DREAM JOURNEY

Dream Journey is a participatory research method for speculaitive design and it invites people in public spaces on a meditative journey to ask for new ideas from pedestriants.

For our semester project we developed a guidebook for a new, holistic tourism structure together with the citizen’s cooperative of Obervinschgau. We believe transformative and resilient tourism should become the norm and not a niche.

In order to encourage participation within the speculative process we developed the project “Dream Journey”. A cylinder hanging from the ceiling or a tree is outfitted with a motion sensor which sets off a narration accompanied by calm music and sounds from nature. Within this private space, the participant is invited to close their eyes and the voice guides them to envision their future holiday in South Tyrol. In order to collect their thoughts and ideas, they are asked to write or draw in the inside of the cylinder where they can add to what others have developed before. They are guided through a whole day on vacation by rotating around their own axis for different questions:

Where do you want to wake up, what do you see? What activities do you do? How do you imagine “alternative wellness” to look like? What do you want to eat? How do you interact with locals?

As we believe that this method is valuable for any project where speculative ideas from a community is needed, we created a guide on how to build a Dream Journey with Arduino. It includes a material list, a construction guide for the hardware, the Wiring diagram and the code to program the Arduino and