Event

Collider: Designing a sustainable future for the Scottish visitor economy

Design Informatics Collider in collaboration with Visit Scotland and the Edinburgh Futures Institute

Tourism is important to Scotland, contributing over £11bn to Scottish GDP and representing over 14,000 Scottish businesses. In 2017 over 14.9 million visitors came to Scotland, which included 3.2 million international visitors, and visits are expected to rise over the coming decade. One of the biggest proportion of visitors to Scotland are Scots themselves who have a substantial stake in maintaining Scotland as a desirable place to live and work. Scottish communities need the required infrastructure to sustain a high-quality visitor and resident experience. With tightening government purse-strings and in an environment of political uncertainty how can we find novel ways to prioritise public and private investment in Scotland as a visitor destination?

If we could glimpse into a possible future we could build a case for positive, sustainable and unified investments in infrastructure, rather than a future of uninformed or disparate investment frameworks. Infrastructure decision-makers and planners could soon be using have a brand new suite of interactive, visual, and data-driven tools ranging from infrastructure mapping applications to simulations. Much of this innovation is taking place at the city level but so much of the authentic experience of Scotland enjoyed by visitors and residents is the outstanding beauty of the rural environment. How can we harness new data sources and technologies to change incentivise new infrastructure? Where could innovations from Scotland’s thriving sectors such as the games industry be applied in better regional planning?

Visit Scotland and Edinburgh Futures Institute invites you to consider what a sustainable visitor destination might feel like and to co-design how new infrastructure developments could be shaped for the benefit of residents, businesses and visitors.

This Collider will bring together academic staff, students, innovators and creatives to work together to develop outlandish and viable propositions for how technology might be designed, deployed, governed and accessed to positively to design the physical environment of Scotland’s popular visitor destinations.

A collider is a conceptual design event, bringing together computational thinking and design thinking, to pull informaticians together with designers, and problem holders. The first part of the Collider sets the scene through invited provocations before breaking out in to co-design sessions.

Speakers include Vicente Javier Molés Molés (Advisor to the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Andy Hudson-Smith (Professor of Digital Urban Systems, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL) and Kate Ho (Head of Innovation Labs at Sainsbury’s Bank).

Registration and tea/coffee will begin from 9.00am with the event starting at 9.30am until 12.30pm.

Event is free but places are limited so please sign up in advance via Eventbrite.


Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB