Klooster Wittem, a redemptorist monastery located in South Limburg, has a rich tradition and history as a (former) training centre for pastoral students and enjoys national fame as a place of pilgrimage. In April of 2020, part of the monastery was sold, and renovation plans for the remaining part were made. The desire to tell the different stories was born within the community and they needed extra help to research and create a product that would be able to tell the different existing stories.
The project aims to translate the story of Klooster Wittem into analogue and digital multimedia designs to allow the non-frequent visitors to explore the stories throughout their visit as well as enable them to discover them at home and/or share them with friends and family.
As mentioned, our target group are non-frequent visitors, they include two types of people: Frequent Travellers and Scouts. Due to this double target group with different needs, it is important to find a good balance and to be able to do that, working with different information layers is the key.
Not only do you want to trigger the curiosity and attention of your visitor, but you also want them to come out of the experience having learnt something. You can do that through different techniques such as: creating hands-on and mind-on experiences, creating hooks to existing/previous knowledge, triggering conversations and trying to expand the visit time of your visitor.
For this project and the needs of the target group and the monastery, transmedia storytelling is the best solution. This technique allows us to use multiple media that are researched to be the best fitting for the content and the different needs of our visitors and create one big story together. After researching different mediums and concepts, a final choice has been made: a digital and analogue experience throughout the building. That includes panels with information in the different chapels with a supporting QR-code that will lead you to a mobile app that will allow you to discover the different saints’ stories throughout the different chapels and a kiosk installation.
For the prototyping part of the project, in agreement with the monastery, I developed a high-fidelity prototype for both the mobile app and the kiosk installation but not for the other elements of the transmedia experience. The mobile app is divided into two categories: 1. One part of your on-site experience where the core of the different stories is presented with different audio stories and interactive elements. 2. And the second part is where you’ll be able to find detailed stories that you can either discover during your experience or at home if you desire to read more information about the different saints.
For this graduation project, we focused on three stories: Gerardus Majella, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and the history of Klooster Wittem but this concept can be used as a template and eventually all the different saints can be added to the list in the app.
