This article explores the methodological framework and examines the learning and scientific outcomes of a workshop activity centred on the innovative integration of digital heritage approaches with design thinking methodologies. The workshop was developed in the Italian central Apennines and it investigated the design implications of working on heritage contexts in marginal areas using innovative digital tools, as well as the impact of this approach on the community. The activities engaged international students and professors, employed a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and trans-scalar approach encompassing field research, data processing, dialogue, and collaborative visioning. The findings are both methodological and thematic. Methodologically, the workshop introduced a novel approach to architectural education by integrating digitalization in the design process and by fostering an urban vision that bridges research with local needs. Thematically, the outputs explore new uses for “potential spaces”, sustainable mobility, heritage-led strategies, and tourism, emphasizing community involvement. The workshop’s originality lies in its cognitive, narrative, and design processes, where digital data are part of the creative process. Despite the workshop’s compressed timeline, it successfully fostered creative thinking and practical solutions, demonstrating the value of intense, interdisciplinary collaborative visioning for heritage regeneration. The workshop’s broader implications include potential spin-offs into future community engagement and knowledge-transfer activities, highlighting its social and practical relevance.

This contribution presents the Manifesto for RESETtling APPenines, developed as part of a doctoral thesis, with the aim of using the knowledge acquired during the research and transfer it in a clear and replicable way to the territory, in order to promote sustainable interventions on the existing built heritage in the inner areas, which are the focus of the study. The Manifesto is intended as a starting (or re-starting) point—built on a solid trans-scalar and multidisciplinary exploratory path—that intertwines together strategies and actions for territorial promotion, cultural heritage valorization, and transformation of the living space, for a resilient rebirth of the inner areas. Rather than serving as a regulatory document, it offers a flexible tool to support re-inhabiting these territories by proposing a completely new way of interpreting and reusing the existing heritage. Based on four main statements that emerged from the research, the Manifesto emphasizes the importance of architectural design in the processes of recovering and reusing abandoned or underused architectural spaces. It outlines, in twelve points, a set of guidelines or intervention strategies for re-inhabiting fragile and marginal contexts—rich in historical heritage—like those of the inner areas, through the re-activation of what have been defined as “potential spaces.” In the Manifesto, adaptive reuse is not proposed as a mere response to a period of crisis, but as a responsible attitude and a design strategy through which to experiment with cultural, productive, social, and energy innovations. The document thus offers a framework for future projects capable of combining the historical memory of sites with the transformation required by regeneration, while fostering shared visions that address local needs and create lasting, vibrant communities.