Local stories: Context mapping for culturally sensitive design in creative tourism

The conference presentation discusses longitudinal research that has been conducted in Finnish Lapland and Namibia over a decade. The focus of the research with marginalised creative communities in these two research settings, but especially in Finnish Lapland, will continue through the involvement of a group of artist-researchers from the University of Lapland in the AMASS research project. This specific presentation explores the processes designer-makers and communities should engage in before using service design approaches to produce creative tourism experiences. Research between 2010 and 2020 in Finnish Lapland and Namibia show the importance of identity construction, creativity and storytelling for context mapping in the development of services for creative tourism that has the potential to mitigate a variety of societal challenges for marginalised crafts practitioners. A practical and flexible mapping tool that has been derived from these case studies is suggested in the presentation. The mapping tool will be assessed in some of the artistic experiments that will be implemented in Finnish Lapland in 2020 and 2021. The findings indicate that creative tourism can provide sustainable livelihoods for marginalised designer-makers.