© Visit Tampere / Laura Vanzo
While the other project partners, Rotterdam and Flanders, focus on areas such as urban planning and modelling various environmental impacts, Tampere’s pilots bring culture and history to life through digital means. With the help of CitiVerse technologies, residents and visitors are offered new ways to explore the city’s cultural history – for example through interactive art maps, exhibitions and narratives of the Civil War that make use of extended reality (XR).
During the project, Tampere will implement five pilots centred around digital cultural experiences. These pilots will mainly take place in two locations: the city centre, which already features a wide range of cultural activities and public art, and the 15,000-seat Nokia Arena. The pilots promote cultural participation, learning and creative expression among citizens by integrating XR into art and public spaces.
In the “Public Art on the Map” pilot, city residents and visitors can explore the history of Tampere’s iconic public artworks through a map-based platform. In addition to digitizing existing materials related to public art, the pilot aims to produce new, engaging digital content, including AR experiences. The pilot also involves developing an updated process description for public art projects, enabling the identification of development opportunities related to participation, regionality and other aspects of public art initiatives.
To get a better understanding of residents’ opinion of art in the public space and gather valuable input to developing the platform, an online survey was sent to the members of Tampere residents’ panel. The questions were related to e.g. the features of the forthcoming Public Art on a Map platform, preferred categorization of artworks, preferred devices and interest towards different type of materials, quizzes and gamified elements.
Tampere residents’ panel consists of people who share an interest in influencing Tampere and its services. Anyone aged 16 or over is welcome to join, and no special expertise is required. At the time of writing, the panel had 537 members with different backgrounds.
The panel operates mainly online. Various surveys and other tasks are published on the panel’s own website, and panel members respond to them according to their own interests whenever they want. Panel members are notified of new tasks by email. Participation is entirely voluntary, and members can leave at any time.
In total, 232 replies were received. Interestingly, 64% of the respondents were more interested in accessing public art via a dedicated website rather than a dedicated application. To address this wish, we have already started studying the possibility of implementing the website.
67% of participants felt that they would explore the artworks for leisure instead of practical purposes (23%). Reasons for potentially using the platform included e.g. entertainment, relaxing, exploring the city in a new way, learning the history of Tampere, showing the city to foreign friends, to get more info on a certain artwork and studying the artworks before visiting them in real life.
While 54% of respondents would also like to visit the artworks physically, 46% would prefer to use the platform at home.
96% of respondents were interested in the history of the artworks. Info on artists (87%) and used materials and techniques (62%) were also considered important. Wishes for features included e.g. map-based browsing, 360-degree photos, filtering based on themes and artists, easy-to-access content, stories related to artworks and gamified elements were also expressed. Photos and text on the history of artworks were the most preferred content types. Different kinds of walking tours were also considered interesting: “Art trails for sure are very interesting, and they can engage people in exploring the city too.”
At the moment, we are in the middle of developing the application version of Public Art on the Map. Feedback gathered in the survey has proved to be very valuable to us, and whenever possible, it has been taken into account in the development of the platform.
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Stay tuned! In the coming months, we will publish more stories on the progress of Tampere use cases on our website and LinkedIn page.
