Post-industrial cities often find themselves at a crossroads as to whether to find a new identity or embrace their industrial past. In late 2017, after the closure of major manufacturing plants in the region, the Australian city of Geelong was designated a UNESCO City of Design and embraced a “Clever and Creative” strategy which acknowledged Geelong’s industrial and design past in responding to contemporary technological, demographic, and economic challenges. However, questions remain as to which versions of the past are valued by the local community and how these stories can be shared. To better understand the social value of design and manufacturing heritage in Geelong as well as to get initial feedback on how to interpret this type of heritage through novel immersive extended reality (XR) experiences, the researchers took a community-led approach. This paper reports on the results of the initial online community surveys (N = 55–137) and in-person stakeholder interviews (N = 5) with carefully selected representatives of the local government, education, heritage, tourism, and engineering sectors. The study’s outcome demonstrates the importance of design and manufacturing heritage for the local community’s identity. Moreover, this type of heritage provides a source of inspiration, learning opportunities for future creative problem-solvers, and economic opportunities through tourism. By engaging with the social value of design and manufacturing heritage, this paper argues that more effective and targeted storytelling, game-like applications, and other digital immersive experiences such as extended reality (XR) can be used to better engage with audiences.
From 1979, the new town of Milton Keynes embraced a new marketing approach which emphasised its capacity to elicit wondrous, uplifting, and desirable bodily sensations. This coincided with the transformation of the town's central landscape, with Britain's largest mall, The Shopping Building opening in 1979, followed in 1985 by Britain's first multiplex cinema, The Point. This new direction in Milton Keynes' marketing rejected national media narratives of the town's sterility, while reorienting its administration away from the now-toxic political legacy of Keynesianism and towards consumer capitalism. This presented the Shopping Building, The Point and Milton Keynes as a whole, as containing forces that intensified and proliferated potential sensory experiences which resisted quantification and could only be understood fully through immediate presence. This deliberate non-specificity equated the undifferentiated general ideal of sensation with the liberatory capacities of consumer choice, while concealing the encroaching constraints on human possibility arising from commodification of sensations and public space. While critical accounts identified this new determinism as a damaging force, Milton Keynes was nonetheless able to redefine its public image during the early years of the Thatcher government by association with private consumption and private sensation. "You've never seen anything like it" 2
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