08 May 2013

CHIEF's Hack your City contest winners announced

Reading Portimão - Discovering a City project logo

Jez Collins' project Birmingham Music Archive

The winners of CHIEF contest Hack your City: Cultural Tourism, Internationalization & Localization are Jez Collins with the idea "Popular Music as Cultural Heritage" and Carla Vieira with the idea "Reading Portimão - Discovering a City".

"Reading Portimão - Discovering a City" is a project by Teia D'Impulsos, a non-profit association dedicated to the social and cultural development, coordinated by Carla Vieira, that aims to promote the preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of Portimão, a city in Algarve, Portugal.

Portimão ia a well-known tourist destination, but "a lot of tourists ask for a little bit more than the sun and the beaches. They want a cultural experience."

"Reading Portimão" will create thematic routes around points of interest that can be followed by all visitors and "will focus not only on the material heritage but mostly on the memories, the stories, the legends of each place" as Carla Vieira describes:

"Reading Portimão" will listen the voices from the Past and bring them to the Present. In each point of interest, the visitor will find a citation or an iconographic element in intend to arouse his curiosity. There will be a QRcode right next to it. So, he could access to the necessary information about the place using his own smartphone."

"Popular Music as Cultural Heritage" describes an idea for a mobile app based in the Jez Collins' project Birmingham Music Archive. Birmingham has several important venues to popular music scene where successful international bands started giving concerts and has a global music and cultural tourism market. Due to landscape changes, this venues are disappearing. 

The mobile app would allow to virtually recreate these spaces in the following way, described by Jez Collins:

Working with technologists, architects and sound engineers, I'd like to virtually rebuild these venues online and populate them with photographs, flyers, tickets stubs and the oral histories of audiences, musicians, promoters on an immersive mobile platform that would inform and engage local communities and visiting tourists (think of all those baby boomers who grew up with popular music) which would aid in walking tours of the city or in driving traffic to specific sites dotted around the city, in essence people could create their own itinerary and also 'keep' content to re-use.

Carla Vieira will be at mNACTEC, in Terrassa, presenting her idea "Reading Portimão" in the CreativeCH Workshop, "Cultural Tourism", to be held next 10th of May.

EuroMACHS Facebook page will be posting updates on the workshop.