THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE NORTH AS AN OBJECT OF DESIGN INTERPRETATION (REGARDING OB UGRIC PEOPLE)

The article presents the study of the design application, namely practical use of the elements of the traditional culture of Ob Ugric people, that include scenic compositions of rites and rituals as well as contextual attributes and decorations (ornaments). The research goal is to formulate a method of design interpretation that provides for ethically and efficiently embedment of elements of traditional culture into the semantic and image-bearing field of contemporary multicultural reality. This method is expected to further address the challenge of the deliberate development of a new/hybrid culture in the studied region (and, in a broad sense, in the entire territory of the Russian North). The novelty of the research is the detailed exploration of structural elements of the chosen culture in combination with the synchronous selection of tools, such as concepts of social and human sciences, as well as the means of a design that include formal, spatial, social, economic, ecological and technological representations. The basic methodology for analyzing research materials a systemic approach and structural elements of culture such as ornaments, rituals, and rituals were examined in a united figurative and semantic context. The combination of the methods of historical analysis and field ethnography allowed to identify the content and evolution of the studied phenomenon, as well as to consider individual cultural patterns and actions in real place and time. The proposed method of interpretation includes two following logical steps of identification: (1) the non-changeable content of the cultural core, which provides an inherent connection with the environment where the given culture takes place, and (2) the outer layer (material shell) that is available for transformation/modernization. As a result, the proposed method is presented through, first, the theoretical principles of a proper design interpretation based on the existing examples of cultural borrowings (with the case of traditional ornaments); and second, an educational experiment of designing a new Northern culture through borrowing and interpreting the traditional festivity “The Crow’s Day,” with a potential implementation within the local tourism industry. The final part describes the broad research relevance of the findings, along with the limitations and directions for further research.