Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how maritime landscape can be used as a resource when designing sensory tourism establishments – more specifically an outdoor water world. Through artistic and phenomenological design, the concept ‘magic of place’ is ethnographically applied to a coastal area in order to transform and transport nature’s characteristics into play activities and edutainment.

Paper long abstract:

Concepts such as imagination, creativity and nature-based, ecological innovation often lack in the Scandinavian small and medium sized tourism- and leisure industry. Paradoxically enough, this industry is also supposed to be magic which - by definition - is meant to differ from notions of 'everyday life' and 'ordinary reasoning'.

Nevertheless, the predictable has crept up in the magic industry and the result is its' standardised mass-products: Nature and landscape is more often considered a scene for tourism behaviour but seldom viewed upon as a resource that can be closely incorporated into the experience of sensing the natural forces.

This particular case of a water world development project located in southern Norway was never put into production. Phenomenological sensory of the natural landscape met a rather traditional, safe or un-experimental leisure industry and the collision of meaning, regarding aesthetic sensing and experiencing obstructed the project.

Still, I will debate the values and manifestations of 'new' coastal experiences: How can one apply 'maritime nature' in the field of a water world industry? This paper thus discusses the natural resources found at a particular place and the research strategy-approach when materialising and incorporating the sensory aspects of coastal geography into water leisure experiences. I will give examples of how ethnographic methods and analytical concepts such as magic of place, phenomenological experiments, storytelling and edutainment can transform coastal materiality into a corresponding water world establishment's sense-scape - designed from and located in nature.