The Virtual Culture House – Shaping the Identity of a Public Knowledge Institution

Paper in proceeding, 2015

In this paper, we will discuss how a virtual platform can be used in order to explore communication forms for stakeholders in the planning process of public knowledge institutions. The paper presents the Virtual Culture House, an attempt to stimulate the communication among stakeholders and users of a future culture house. The project is cooperation between Chalmers University of Technology and the municipality of Lundby in Sweden, and aims to find new ways of complementing the traditional architectural visualizations and public hearings for engaging citizens in the development process of public knowledge institutions. The contribution of this paper is two-fold; firstly it presents a virtual platform based on activities to complement the traditional methods for involving stakeholders in the development process of public knowledge institutions, and secondly, it introduces visitors, citizens, contributors and officials as stakeholders on equal ground, and claim that such a dialogical tool can support user involvement and participation and stimulate both staged activities and self-motivated activities. The Virtual Culture House forms, together with the physical local community, an activity-based physical-digital space that shapes the identity of the future physical culture house.