The aims of the project entitled Innovative Cultural Heritage the Root of European Identity (INTERACT) are gravitated in the same direction as the European Cultural Tourism sector policies, which are adopting innovative practices for tourists pursuing authentic cultural experiences. In addition to this is a commitment to improving service quality, promoting historical traditions, preserving local culture and boosting landscapes and heritage. Based on this approach, the INTERACT Project plans to utilise the transnational cultural tourism strategy promoted by the European Commission. The European Commission's goal is to implement a series of activities to improve professional and transferable skills, as well as create sustainable tourism services strategies, in order to boost the importance and increase the knowledge of the European Cultural Identity, making it affordable and accessible to a wider public, from across backgrounds and generations. INTERACT project intends to deliver innovative training and professional opportunities to educators as well as operators who are keen or already performing in the field of Cultural Heritage, through activities project-based learning of 28 months. The project will be managed by the coordinator FIND AN INTERNSHIP with the support of a consortium of partners. This consortium is comprised of organisation in the following fields: - Adult Education -Theater - Non- Verbal Communication -Tale practices -Digital Media related to tourism The partner organisations plan to promote new innovative tools, guidelines, and practices in different EU countries and promote activities. The INTERACT partnership is as follow: - YOUTH EUROPE SERVICE from Italy -S.C PREDICT CSD from Romania - INTERACTING S.L from Spain -LOGOS POLSKA from Poland FIND AN INTERNSHIP from the UK (Coordinator). The project lifecycle will be based on the dispatching of tasks among all partners on the basis of timeline. In addition, an efficient process will enable the proactive participation of all the partners from the responsibility roles to the deliverables. All the tasks will be implemented with the input of the others. The main activities of the INTERACT project will be as follows: -Five Transnational Project Meeting (TPM): With the goal of starting the development of the project activities, dissemination strategies, developing and sharing good practices as well as intellectual outputs. - Joint Staff Training Event (JSTE): The joint staff training event will offer an opportunity to evaluate activities through testing and peer learning. The event will be attended by 15 participants (3 from each organisation) with the aim of developing an educational toolkit. The educational toolkit will be given to the participants of the final seminars. -Three Intellectual Outputs creation (IO): IO1- Theatrical Performances A series of theatrically guided tours with “guiding actors” wearing historical dresses, will talk about the principal historical and artistical points of interest of the European cities involved. IO2- Digital Platform A Digital Platform with research material on the contents produced inside the project (to enhance the experience before and after the events). IO3-Experiential Augmented Reality app An Experiential Augmented Reality app for mobile devices, connected to an analogic map/game to: - Experience real-time created contents - Guide the audience through the discovery of the imagined path with video - Animations - Dissemination of the project results: in the context of local multiplier events, during which the intellectual output will be presented and tested, opening the experience of public enjoyment of citizens, tourists, and local stakeholders. -Training Seminars: Will take place in each partner country at the end of the project activities. The purpose of the training seminars is to share the educational toolkit and train participants in order to be competitive entrepreneurs or employable in the Cultural Tourism market. Overall, all the activities of the INTERACT project intend to create a path to improve skills, knowledge, and experience in the field of cultural heritage. Furthermore, the project will explore intercultural communication and establish cultural heritage as important for our identity.
INTERACT project intended to enter the transnational strategy of cultural tourism promoted by the European Commission, which aspires to realize a series of activities that promoted competencies and international touristic output. This referred to specific themes with remarkable growth potential and capable of responding to social concerns of territorial cohesion and protection/valorisation of cultural and natural patrimony. Specifically, INTERACT’s goal was to transfer to operators, educators, and mediators new knowledge and skills about cultural mediation theatrical and digital storytelling to co-create new products of cultural tourism expendable in the market. INTERACT wished to follow the realisation of these products through international experiences, promoted by a strategic partnership with organisations with expertise in the field of theatre, design and digital programming, storytelling methods applied to the cultural heritage from Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Tourism is critical to the development of European areas and helps to mitigate the harmful impacts of economic crises. Tourist services and output contribute to local development by creating new jobs that can compensate for industrial or local downturns, as well as safeguarding and enhancing natural and cultural heritage in fields such as the arts, local gastronomy, and biodiversity protection. In recent years, European cultural tourism has moved from its most conventional forms, which centred on museum and monument visits, to more active and participatory forms of modern culture utilisation. While managing this transformation, cities and regions are required to add management, invention, and production of cultural abilities to their traditional duty as culture custodians. In the postmodern period, where the visitor actively chooses and enjoys his own journey, it is vital to adapt the approach to destination marketing and commercialization. Politics in cultural tourism must adapt to changing inclinations of visitors searching for authentic cultural experiences and produce an offer to: • Promote local traditions • Care about the sustainable aspects • Protect the patrimony, the local places, and the culture. With this kind of approach, we are now experiencing the rise of a new “race” of creative mediators like: • Digital programmers and designers • Experts in storytelling methods and theatrical techniques that come from other departments of “cultural industries”, able to project new output and experiences of cultural tourism, applied to cultural patrimony. Creativity has evolved into a strategy that cities and regions must spread and support in order to foster innovation and the development of individual skills. By providing the traveller with a genuine and more customisable experience, cultural tourism can be an alternate strategy to the serial duplication of mass tourism.