The project sought to promote European values and intercultural dialogue to build common histories in the face of immigration into the European Union and new forms of interaction over the past and many years to come. Through these, we set out to contribute to a more culturally aware, diverse, and empathetic Europe towards migration at a time when the region was struggling with how to receive migrants. The project’s fundamental value was and remains its aim to innovatively do this through digitally dynamic products, which would along the way equally enhance digital skills, new technologies learning and utilization, critical thinking about social issues, and media literacy. We also built a virtual cultural heritage museum to provide an available repository of cultural knowledge. The goal remains to widen people's knowledge and knowledge sources through developing a repository of usable, expandable, easily multipliable, socially, and technologically innovative, publicly available products. The project concretely aimed at giving possibilities to European partners to develop innovative ideas - here in the form of an AR migration game and related supportive components available here - https://www.thejourney.today
This project was developed from a background that Europe needed amicable ways to dynamically work with the growing number of migrants into its boundaries. It was at the backdrop of the total number of migrants arriving in Europe peaking in October 2015 when approximately 222,500 refugees and migrants arrived in one month (UNHCR), of which most by far (211,700) landed in Greece, coming from Turkey. At that time our partnership developed the board game – The Journey Istanbul, which became a European Union award winner in 2015 for its ways of encouraging inter-cultural dialogue and understanding around migration. Years on, the flow of migration from the Middle Eastern and North African countries continued and was exacerbated by the early 2020s shocks of the Covid19. Our answer was to share several practices on how we could do this by innovating the earlier developed award-winning board game into a more agile, easy-to-multiply, close-to-realistic presentation of refugee journeys into an Augmented reality version (AR), along with other usable components. The project aimed to contribute to a more culturally aware, diverse, and empathetic Europe towards migration.