Sometimes this work brings us the most amazing opportunities. Visiting Arctic Norway is high on the list for ‘best things we have done in the course of business’. It is a fabulous place. Participating in a national conference on ‘Visitor Experience in Norway’s Regional Parks’ enriched the experience. It not only bought us into contact with a new set of committed, experienced and thoughtful practitioners but also required us to distill the lessons we had learned from our recent work on the strategic, national-scale planning of interpretation and visitor experience in Irish and English National Parks.
We always do a lot of reflecting on lessons learned from our projects but sometimes it is a bit informal.
In our keynote, we focused on experience planning in protected areas and in particular the crucial interrelationship between thematic interpretive planning, heritage resource management and visitor experience planning and how this leads to what we see as ‘truly sustainable experiences’.The last year has been one of the most interesting and stimulating in the 30 years of TellTale, so it was really good to identify the key lessons from it. There were many and more are evolving.
The three circles of integrated framework planning
Susan also ran a workshop on themes and stories, showing how people could translate the themes from an interpretive plan into stories and experiential storytelling.