11 September 2014

CATALONIA'S SHOWCASE WRAP UP. LESSONS LEARNED AND OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED

CreativeCH is approaching to its end, and therefore is the time to wrap up some conclusions. How would you define the Catalan’s Showcase experience?

I understand CreativeCH as a succesful opportunity to bring, with appropriate technologies, our heritage to our target: the youngest. With our showcase, we highlight our cultural heritage and promote industrial heritage sites as focus of revitalization through adaption and use as tourist attractions and educational tools. The potential of those sites has always been there, and CreativeCH gave us the impulse to develop innovative actions, such as El Fotocroma, Terrassa Augmentada and Egarec Video contest, to make it more appealing.

The goal of your showcase was to bridge the industrial heritage with the newest possibilities offered by ICT.  Surely a fascinating goal. How did this experience developed? What did you learn from CreativeCH’s experience?

Thank you, it is fascinating! During the project’s lifetime, the showcase has implemented five actions: setting up of El Fotocroma, improving of the existing official mNACTEC app, launching of Egarec video contest, releasing of Terrassa Augmentada and last, but not least, publishing of the book Espais recobrats. Els nous usos del patrimoni industrial català. The showcase also offers a full and rich educational and leisure programme, including: treasure hunts, guided tours around the museum and/or Terrassa, training activities and co-creative participatory sessions with students, among others.
With a participatory methodology, we address two targets among young people: first, the museum aims to engage young students and their teachers in the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation of the showcase, as a way to stimulate the attraction and interest of industrial tourism for the younger generation. In this challenge, our partners from Torre del Palau High School have contributed to make it possible. Second, our actions also target a more family-oriented audience and address families in their leisure time. We can reach this target because Terrassa’s civil society is highly participatory. I’m thinking of the splendid festival Fira Modernista, for example.
The main lesson learned, apart from those already mentioned in the previous interview, is that the actions taken with CreativeCH are in tune with what people demand. For example, we organized an app-guided treasure hunt around the city and discovered that there was a genuine interest and expectation among the local community for innovative mobile content in a leisure context.
We have also understood that working in innovative fields is very complex, and we still have a lot of work ahead in order to consolidate the actions taken… real work starts now!

Your experience is for sure unique in Europe, but one of the CreativeCH’s goals was to create the conditions for other realities to follow you experience. How do you think others can take advantage from Catalonia’s showcase findings?

We regularly disseminate the showcase findings through several channels (project website, museum website and blogs, social media), understanding those channels also as a tool for others to take advantage from our experience.
We already had the chance to share our participation in CreativeCH in other latitudes. The Education Observatory of the Colombian Caribbean (Observatorio de Educación del Caribe Colombiano) echoed our experience with CreativeCH. They showed interest in two aspects of the showcase: first, the co-participation of young people; second, whether our experience is potentially exportable to other contexts and countries.
And we had a second experience beyond the European borders: last March, mNACTEC was invited to share the CreativeCH experience in “Industrial Heritage Youth Programme in Tomioka Silk Mill and Related Sites” (Japan). The aim of the event was to promote international interchange and academic research centered on Tomioka Silk Mill and Related Sites, included in the Japanese Tentative List of World Heritage Sites in 2007. The conference gathered professionals from across the world working in industrial Heritage from different fields.
Every local showcase focuses on different heritage content and tackles in an exemplary way in a concrete local setting. However, there has been a synergy among partners and several local showcases have come to similar initiatives, such as developing mobile applications. In my opinion, the conceptualization of the project is 100% exportable. We are so excited with the showcase outcomes that we applied to the V Ibero-American Award of Education and Museums 2014. Fingers crossed!