Smart heritage tourism in the High Coast of Sweden
The Västernorrlands museum is currently, as a part of its digital transformation, designing new museum experiences based on storytelling. Experiences where people, cultural heritage and places meet. This work is now being further developed in an 18 month project, Smart Heritage Tourism in the High Coast of Sweden, with financial support from Leader Höga Kusten.
The project aims to develop digitally enhanced location-based experiences for heritage destinations in the area. The target group is the smart tourist who takes part of destinations via ICT, Information and communication technology, and especially via their mobile phones. The aim is to increase the attractiveness of visitor destinations and contribute to a positive, extended and deepened experience for visitors.
In the shape of an innovation lab, the project will explore different digital and physical channels and formats to create unique and engaging experiences for selected visitor destinations. Innovation lab here means that the project creates spaces for different stakeholders to meet in order to stimulate innovation processes, creativity and new knowledge in smart tourism, cultural heritage, storytelling and experience design.
Transmedia storytelling is a central method in the project as digital today does not mean one single channel but an ecosystem of touch points and channels. By connecting places, stories and experiences, broader and deeper experiences across multiple locations and over time are enabled. Through their immersive and interactive properties, transmedia stories also have the ability to, for example, strengthen visitors’ awareness of sustainable tourism.
The project idea
In order to respond to the development towards smart tourism, the Västernorrlands museum has started to develop new ways to disseminate strong, entertaining and engaging stories about the region’s cultural and historical environments via digital technology. An example is the dramatized media guide I rysshärjningarens spår 1721, about the Russian attacks on Sweden and the region in 1721. The goal is to enhance cultural heritage experiences in the museum and in the region with digital technology, new formats, richer interactive content and with stories that open up deeper and longer experiences.
The project Smart heritage tourism in the High Coast of Sweden is based on the museum’s long experience in producing educational and learning experiences, storytelling and experience design. Through cross-sector cooperation, workshops and prototype work, local stories are given a new shape. The focus is on creating stories for many channels and formats, strong and engaging stories, which can be easily reused in new ways and contexts, and which can form the basis of new experiences.
Questions to answer in the project
- How can the project, with the Västernorrlands museum as a central node, lay the foundation for long-term collaborative forms and structures for content production, production of new media formats, and continue to find important places, stories and events to mediate?
- How can the museum, in collaboration with participating organisations, manage the innovation process and the methods and products developed in the project in the long term?
- How do we design digitally enhanced experiences that supports and develops heritage tourism in the area, and how is content packaged in different formats with the aim of strengthening the physical experience but also sparking curiosity among more visitors about the area’s cultural heritage and cultural environments, attracting physical visits?
- How are the experiences marketed so that they actually reach the target groups?
- How can the experiences be further developed based on conclusions from user data analytics?
Contact
For more information about the project, contact Kajsa Hartig, Head of Department, Museum Experience and Collections, kajsa.hartig@vnmuseum.se
Financing
Local Development by Leader Höga Kusten supports the project Smart heritage tourism in the High Coast of Sweden through the rural program 2014-2020. The support from the rural program 2014-2020 is partly financed by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development.
Top photo: View from Rödklitten over Gaviksfjärden. Nordingrås parish, Kramfors municipality, Ångermanland, Sweden. Photo: Gotogo, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA. / Översta bilden: Utsikt från Rödklitten över Gaviksfjärden. Nordingrås socken, Kramfors kommun, Ångermanland, Sweden. Foto: Gotogo, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA.