I Wish You Were Here. Designing a Geostorytelling Ecosystem for Enhancing the Small Heritages’ Experience

Slow tourism is a different, more conscious, and sustainable way of travelling, often targeting places secondary to cities of art and mainstream locations but rich in lesser-known social, intangible, and cultural heritage. While digital technologies have provided tools to make cultural places, institutions and GLAMs accessible, top-down and informative communication no longer seem sufficient to intercept both the more sophisticated public and the new generations whose information consumption is increasingly mediated by smartphones and the experience shared with peers through social networks. The paper proposes and discusses an exploration and a design prototype of a mobile geostorytelling ecosystem related to the “Prosecco hills” – Valdobbiadene e Conegliano in Treviso province, in northern Italy, recently designated a UNESCO heritage site – based on a bi-directional communication platform whose aim is, on the one hand, to allow minor realities – the “small heritages” – to be present efficiently and effectively on online and in-situ thanks to shared communication tools, on the other hand, to allow people to create georeferenced points of interest for other users through mechanisms of storytelling and emotional connection with the territory and the visitors.