10 years after the terror attack on Oslo and Utøya, the 22 July Center is developing a new digital platform for public viewing and educational purposes.
Respectfully conveying the memory of 22nd July
Photo: Paal Sørensen (Creative commons https://creativecommons.org/li...)
The 22 July Center has a very important societal mission: Managing Norway’s collective memory of the terrorist attack on the Governmental buildings and the island of Utøya in 2011. The Center is a communicator of knowledge both about the attack itself, and about related themes and trends of our time. Just as importantly, The Center plays a role in stimulating reflection, discussion and awareness, especially among the upgrowing generations.
Today’s digital platform was developed for a temporary exhibition in The Highrise – the building at the center of the attack. As The Center’s mission and activities have expanded, the solution no longer met the needs of neither audiences, students, teachers or The Center itself. Halogen was engaged to help The Center gaining necessary insight and concept development to ensure that the coming solution would be a long lasting platform for learning and communication.
Difficult topics conveyed in a good, respectful manner
One of The Center’s most important tasks is to facilitate teaching about the 22nd of July attack, including difficult subjects such as source criticism, xenophobia, terror and more. Therefore it was clear to us from the beginning that school students had to be among our most important informants. We conducted several workshops with students in different grades, which gave us invaluable insights into how to communicate such sensitive topics in a good way.
After the insight process, we prioritised the most important and difficult challenges and created concepts for how this could be realised, including what this would require of technology and solution.
Halogen proved the ability to get acquainted with the difficult themes quickly, and has facilitated co-creation and involvement with us the whole way. The process was perceived as structured, dignified, engaging and, not at least, educational.
Co-creation of new concepts
The core of our solution suggestion is an idea that the content should be reusable in different settings, and that the communication enables the visitors to gain a visual overview and in-depth understanding of topics of interest. It is also important not to merely convey the facts, but also communicate insight into the confusion, thoughts and opinions on the day the attack.
For educational purposes, we have made concepts supporting and guiding teachers in teaching these topics, making it simple for teachers to adapt prepared education material to their own classes.
Based on the needs we uncovered together with the project group at The 22 July Center, and the concepts we created, we described necessary functionality for The Center’s future platform, to provide The Center with the best possible foundation for creating a user friendly communications and learning platform.
Halogen was listening, collaborative, including and made good choices based on their own competence in connection with the delivery. Highly recommended.
In Halogen we are proud to make this small contribution in supporting The 22 July Center’s work with conveying knowledge about themes that sadly are just as relevant today as ten years ago.