Visual devices for representing, communicating and promoting the city

Abstract

Due to the affective relationship that citizens and communities develop with the places they inhabit, representations of a city have historically served as a vehicle to suggest interpretations. With this assumption, the experimentation conducted with the students in the undergraduate Industrial Design course at the Sapienza University of Rome was established with the conviction that to enhance a city, its culture, and its heritage, it is still necessary to find appropriate forms that can gather identities and diversity, individual experience, and community knowledge. Experimentation in representation/ communication aims to promote quality tourism through an integrated system of products—a brief video (before), an application for mobile devices (during), and a game/memory/guide box (after)—to accompany travellers, who are no longer tourists, for the entire duration of their visit to the city.