SOD - Tourism in Aurland
Why tourism in Aurland has to change and tools to initiate the process
A project by: Ishita Chawla, Maija Hauger, Märtha Sverdrup, Monica Jiang, Philip Lie Petersen, Tiril Bolger, Nora Engan Haugen
In collaboration with: NATURACT for Aurland municipality
Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo
Spring 2023 // GK6 - Introduction to Systems Oriented Design (SOD)
Duration: 8 weeks
Simplifying complexity
Deep research
Material exploration
Analyzing complex systems
Key words: Design for public sector, Systems oriented design, Sustainability
The SOD course focused on Aurland municipality, a heavily tourism-dependent Norwegian region, facing a future of more floods, landslides and other environmental risks in addition to societal challenges of brain drain and centralisation. Our task as a group was to map out the tourism sector, understand challenges and identify regional opportunities. This project contributes to the NATURACT project, which seeks to mobilize stakeholders to come together and plan for a better and more sustainable future in the region.
This course additionally acted as an introduction to Systems Oriented Design methods. Initially, we were presented and guided through models to work with, such as Gigamapping, future scenarios and ZIP analysis, gradually navigating through the complex system on our own.
The outcome
The main goal of this project was to be a tool for NATURACT to use as a conversation opener and project starter for Aurland municipality to talk about internally, together with collaborators, and discuss the possibilities for Aurland’s tourism.
The problems, leverage points, and interventions that our group discovered were presented and reframed as "project starters"; which were opportunities to discuss and generate new ideas for Aurland's tourism. We would have taken this forward through a workshop, which is how we presented our project. This workshop would work as a starting point for these important discussions.
Working with these SOD models was something we as a group collaborated on, working on this equally. As the project came to an end, my job was to create a written narrative that connected the many findings.
