A NARRATIVE SYNTAX FRAMEWORK FOR URBAN FURNITURE DESIGN IN THE MA’ANSHAN STEEL COMMUNITY

Abstract

Industrial heritage includes monumental structures, technical traces, everyday routines, worker biographies, and meanings shared within a community. In heritage settings, however, urban-furniture projects often reduce this heterogeneous evidence to a small repertoire of visual motifs. This paper develops a narrative syntax framework for urban furniture in the Ma’anshan Steel Community. A qualitative-dominant embedded mixed-methods design combines interdisciplinary scholarship with archival records, field observations, three-level coding of 12 key-informant interviews, expert assessment of the interview guide, and a limited Kano analysis of 679 eligible complete records. The interview guide achieved item-level content-validity indices of 0.80-1.00 and an average scale-level content-validity index (S-CVI/Ave) of 0.92. Kano classification identified the seven narrative-translation attributes as Indifferent and four basic functional attributes as Must-be. These findings contextualise attribute priorities; they do not validate the proposed syntax. The resulting framework comprises four Narrative Units—Technological, Material-spatial, Social-biographical, and Symbolic-affective—related through Selection and hierarchy, Combination, Sequence and rhythm, and Interaction and openness. These relations are articulated at object and furniture-cluster scales. Anticipated user interpretation remains an outcome for subsequent evaluation. The framework therefore explains how heterogeneous industrial-memory evidence can be organised before detailed form development without treating memory as ornament or assuming a predetermined user response.

Keywords: Industrial Heritage, Narrative Syntax, Urban Furniture, Industrial Memory, Ma’anshan Steel Community