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Short abstract

This contribution reframes innovation through technoscientific heritage-making, where residues are produced, sorted, and governed. It traces how classification, conservation, and storage practices render some leftovers “heritage” while obscuring others, and what this means for care.

Long abstract

The objective of this contribution is to think innovation through its left-behinds by analysing technoscientific heritage-making as a key site where “innovation residues” are produced, sorted, and governed. Technoscientific heritage-making involves collecting, selecting, interpreting, preserving, restoring, and exhibiting material and immaterial traces of technoscience (e.g., scientific instruments, models, mundane technological objects, infrastructures, and software) together with the narratives and classifications that render them durable as “heritage” across institutional and non-institutional venues. Building on STS approaches to care (Mol 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), we discuss the concept of a “regime of caring” to trace how these arrangements make some leftovers legible while obscuring others.

Empirically, we draw on 14 semi-structured interviews with museum professionals, private collectors, and grassroots museums in contemporary Italy, where technoscientific heritage has only recently been institutionalised. We show how residues persist as (a) material “leftovers” (obsolete artefacts), (b) infrastructural burdens (donation logistics, storage scarcity, maintenance labour), and (c) epistemic residues embedded in cataloguing standards, conservation protocols, and institutional hierarchies that sort remains into “heritage” or “rubbish” and stabilise progress-centred imaginaries.

We identify two interlaced registers within this regime: a civic register oriented to accountability, documentation, and public stewardship, and a biographical register oriented to attachment, repair, and experiential engagement. Their frictions surface in restoration disputes (functionality versus non-intervention) and in the practical politics of “saving” objects under chronic resource constraints. We argue that innovation can be reassembled from the governance of residues, recognising vernacular expertise and repair communities as central to caring for innovation’s afterlives.