Audience

The 3DPAST strategy for audience development was set upon the commitment and interaction of three basic target publics, which was roughly defined as the:

  • WHS local community: focusing on the dwellers;
  • WHS visitors:
    • Foreign cultural tourists,
    • Tourism national institutions,
    • Private agents of the regional tourism sector;
  • Heritage experts + Multimedia technical experts:
    • National institutions,
    • Professional organisations.

Public

Local communities were addressed primarily through data collection and information input, and later, as receivers of the project’s outputs. Communities were also foreseen to closely collaborate in data collection missions.

WHS visitors relate closely to tourist visitors, national tourism institutions and heritage administration, which are the target public for the 3rd phase. This public was regarded as a broad audience (cultural tourism).

Heritage experts and multimedia technical experts were tackled along the in-between phase (the 2nd phase), through the engagement of the technical staff. This consisted on the preparation of data content and the digital applications’ development.

Direct Audience

Regarding the target groups, the first direct audience developed was the WHS’s inhabitants (along phase 1), and their visitors at a final stage of the project.

Also regarding one of the project’s ultimate aims, to target communities with their own rich and valuable cultural heritage, and to help them improve the development and enhancement of conservation maintenance activities.

The organisation of different types of workshops were an opportunity to transfer knowledge to university students and professors.

Indirect Audience

Also to refer is the indirect audience, which comprises project staff engaged on the process, mainly composed of technical agents, historians and architects, who will validate the developed content.

The first predictable audience upgrade related with the staff associated with teaching and R&D units, as integrated students and technicians of correlated scientific fields, throughout the usual collaboration dynamics between universities.

Other Audiences

The project is thus foreseen, as a tool to provide further knowledge, by bringing to light tangible and intangible knowledge, known for generations, regarding those sites’ building cultures, the building’s history of construction, the conservation maintenance, and the singularities of the site’s character.

Workshops are planned with drawing professors, with multimedia experts, etc. These activities targeted different audiences, in order to engage public from different areas, such as, art, architecture, multimedia and tourism.

Other audiences were university students; local associations; tourist agents; local inhabitants; social associations; but also people outside WH sites, interested in the aims of the project.

Consequently, a new (local) audience sector – digital technologic industry – was expected to be developed, as the provided tools stimulated a targeted market, conventionally concentrated in specific territories.

Furthermore, the project also expected to explore creative sceneries, using the available means to promote artistic events, compatible with the sites’ characteristics. This reinforced the sites’ attractiveness for the creative industries, and consequently widen the sites’ cultural offer to increase the visitor’s expectations.

Likewise, it was also a way to bring the world closer to WHS, by allowing audiences that cannot travel, to experience the sites through leading technologies, and to raise awareness for their high cultural and heritage significance. It is also here that the audience development strategies roots: to enhance culture and heritage within borders and across borders – to help communities respect, enjoy, value and preserve this (their) heritage.

Mainly, 3DPAST project intents to raise awareness across and beyond traditional publics and towards new audiences.