Kulturjakten - explore culture in your neighbourhood

An innovation project with the City of Bergen as pilot customer.

www.kulturjakten.no
Kulturjakten is one of our internal projects, initiated by the team itself. The service is developed by us at Link Utvikling AS with innovation support from the City of Bergen. The project is also the only application ever supported by the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Fund.

Kulturjakten is a free service that lets you explore cultural heritage sites in your local area. It has a high degree of gamification, letting you collect points to compete against others and become the culture expert in your municipality. The service is suited to both residents and tourists. The project is in a beta testing phase and has not launched yet.

It was important to us that Kulturjakten should feel like a fun and credible source of cultural information. The team brainstormed which colours we associate with the cultural sector, and the choice fell on orange and purple as complementary colours. Orange represents energy and optimism, elements we feel suit Kulturjakten perfectly since the service is meant to get people moving. Purple symbolises dignity and wisdom, a perfect colour to represent the cultural heritage of the cities. The logo and the typeface had to be easy to understand and were inspired by the formality of the municipalities. The app icon is a modified K symbolising a pin and a direction.

During the design process we ran several market studies with different user groups to make sure the service flow was optimally adapted to each of them. Universal design was given great weight here, so the service can be used by people with visual impairment, among others. The design is strongly marked by gamification, while the core remains the sharing of information the service creates.

The application is built in Flutter, which makes it available for both iOS and Android. It integrates with Google Maps for map functionality. The admin portal is built with Vue.js, and the landing page is set up in Webflow. At the request of the pilot customer for data storage within the EU, a Parse server was set up on Scalingo. That requirement stems in part from the Schrems II ruling. Data is stored in a Postgres database in France, apart from the images, which are stored on DigitalOcean.

The Kulturjakten application is a tool for conveying culture from the municipality to the end user. The app takes users on a culture hunt with different cultural treasures and culture walks where they can earn points and build knowledge. The points are used to compete against friends, and the coins can be exchanged for benefits such as free entry to cinemas and museums. To collect points the user has to be geographically close to a cultural treasure or walk to unlock it, read the information about the heritage site, and then answer a question correctly. The purpose is both to activate and to inform users about the cultural heritage of the cities.

We built a website for the project, www.kulturjakten.no, to spread information about the service to interested parties. The site is strongly inspired by the design of Kulturjakten, with the aim of simplifying the concept. It is divided into a home page with video and a short visual presentation of the application, a page for users with information about the app, a page aimed at municipalities to create interest, and a contact page.

An accompanying admin portal was also developed for the application. This is the main component of the project and gives the municipality full access to share information, see statistics on activity and edit content. The admin portal is the tool the municipality uses for cultural outreach within the service, and has been given a minimalist, clean design.