MEMORY TOURISm

Memory tourism is an idea for a GPS responsive audio-guide app that triggers autobiographical sound-clips as you explore a new town or city. Based in my home-town: Diss, Norfolk. I collected eight interviews with long-term residents about their time and experiences of the town. I then found a target user (a young person feeling disillusioned with the town) to test the idea out. The final product of an investigation into place-identity, heritage, and how relationships are formed with the built environment.

Through a process of evolving projects exploring the nature of community, identity and belonging, I found that personal insight, storytelling and nostalgia were qualities at the core of communicating a place's sense of value, and to helping foster a sense of belonging.

Coming from a small town but living in an urban metropolis, I feel that we are becoming increasingly emotionally distanced from our environments. Major shifts in lifestyle and culture have promoted individualistic lifestyles and uniformed aesthetics while Google maps generates images of neutral sprawl, punctuated only by the occasional 'officially recognised' point of interest. This loss of emotional ties with our towns- pride, value and identity- result in the loss of community and can lead to crime, and anti-social behaviour.

Reminiscene therapy is a common psychological therapy used in care-centres for the elderly, and is proven to promote self-worth and wellbeing in Auzheimers' sufferers. Reminiscene Tourism proposes to make use of the content of these reminiscences. By applying the stories to spatial markers, it allows others to experience a sense of personal history and meaning, providing an insight into a place's subjective value.

The project has the potential to bridge generational divides; preserving subjective history for posterity; promote a sense of place-identity, and give value and importance to the stories and memories of the elderly.