After Images of Decay: Rebuilding the Democratic Process of Designing through Digital Ruins

Abstract

What remains of architecture when its original unified form has turned into a decayed form, but its presence continues to exist in juxtaposed forms? This paper introduces the concept of Jansang (잔상)—a Korean term meaning afterimage with phenomenological implications—as a framework for rethinking decay not as value degradation but as a potential catalyst for reimagining the democratic process of designing. Moving beyond heritage preservation, Jansang describes how architecture persists as collective perception: a distributed field of imagination where digital platforms collectively produce new spatial possibilities.

Through a detailed study of the Ruïnekerk in Bergen (NL), the research examines how the ruin exists simultaneously as a physical remnant and as a luminous afterimage. Countless photographs, hashtags, and shared impressions transform the site into a virtual realm of perception. Each act of framing—a different season, light, or angle— contributes to collectively reshape the architectural imagination of place. From this process emerges the subjectified Jansang, a situated, personal reconstruction that reactivates the ruin as a democratic form of heritage. The central question becomes: can architecture design itself reversely emerge from this dispersed process of seeing and sharing? By treating perception as a medium of design, the paper proposes a model where decay activates new democratic modes of designing—rémanentes, fragmentées et recomposées yet coherent in a constellation with its own dynamics. Methodologically, the project introduces speculative reconstruction through a “kit of parts” system that translates online afterimages into architectural strategies. These methods are not used to restore the ruin, but to convert its collective traces into design tools—allowing decay to generate form rather than negate it. Situated within a broader theoretical constellation including Foucault’s heterotopia, Derrida’s khôra, Hollein’s Alles ist Architektur, this research extends the discourse of haptic world beyond with phenomenological frame. The fragmentations in our haptic world are shared and superimposed by fragmented conglomerates ,which leads to a new possibility of understanding our world of impermanence and permanence. In this sense, Jansang reimagines the future of heritage and design alike: not as acts of preservation, but as continuous processes of participation and renewal, where architecture lives on through the collective afterimage.