To understand the many emotional influences impacting upon your users, emotional geography – involving mapping whilst exploring the connections and opportunities therein – provides a consumer research tool that can be just as useful as physical mapping of culture facilities.
We have already mentioned the role that geography plays for cultural entrepreneurs when it comes to implementing new ideas. Whether shared heritage, ‘owing’ your hometown, or just the close association wih self-identity, each of these presents a strong motivation.
Furthermore, there is also a lot to be said for the importance of ‘local’ for cultural consumers. Whilst major, national brands may be internationally recognisable and draw in the culture tourist, and thereby prove more attractive to corporate sponsors, often the local museum or gallery can elicit an equally emotionally-charged connection with users.
‘Get lost’
New York may perhaps lend itself more naturally to emotional bonds than some other cities, but a project created by the New Museum (NY) could provide a useful model for consumer research and connections.
‘Get Lost’ is a New Museum production providing a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw it as a map, “bringing together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present and future”.
The results provide a series of personal journeys through the city, creating a starting point for discussion of shared and alternative experiences in the commonality of the streets.
Mapping users’ emotional connections
For other culture institutions, replicating this project could create a model to help to provide useful contextual consumer research. In particular, it enables an understanding of the place of your institution, in socio-psychological terms, in relation to other places of importance in the city. Taken from an artist’s perspective, or perhaps replicating the process with local residents, it helps enable a more detailed understanding of how your insitution fits with other influences in the locality, as seen through their eyes.
Two broad benefits from this could be viewed as follows: (1) better understanding the emotional connections and influences upon users, in order to better provide for their needs going forward; and (2) placing the institution as one component in a complex web of overlapping emotional connections, thereby providing more chances to identify entrepreneurial opportunities, and the right connecting spaces for these.
