Tre Trästäder – digital guides for the whole family

Tre Trästäder (Three Wooden Towns) is a collaboration between Nora, Eksjö and Hjo, three small towns in central and southern Sweden that have joined forces to develop ideas and experience around the small town as a cultural heritage destination. In the Tre Trästäder app, you can take self-guided walks in all three towns, learn more about their history and cultural heritage, get tips on places to visit – and meet Cattus!

Challenge

The Tre Trästäder network has existed since 1997, when Eksjö, Hjo and Nora joined forces to develop ideas and share experience around the small town as a cultural heritage destination. The aim was to work together to find methods for long-term, quality-focused cultural tourism.

What the three towns have in common is well-preserved wooden buildings in their town centres, and all three have received the Europa Nostra award, Europe's heritage prize, for good building conservation.

The network wanted a digital tour experience in Hjo, Eksjö and Nora aimed at children and families. They were looking for both a digital platform for the experience and the production of the story itself. The overall theme was to be the same for all the towns – a children's story focusing on the wooden town, its history, wooden construction and conservation – individually adapted to each of the three towns.

Tre Trästäder also wanted to be able to add more town walks and car tours over time, and for representatives of all three towns to have access to the tool so they could manage and update the content.

Solution

We made a native app for Tre Trästäder in which each of the three towns got its own entry in the home screen menu. Alongside developing the app, we also produced the digital tour experience.

At around the same time, Tre Trästäder had started developing a mascot – a cat drawn by the illustration studio Fingerprint illustrationer – who would narrate the new audio guide. The cat was named Cattus, and each town got its own tour in which Cattus, utterly convinced of his own excellence, guides children to historically interesting places. As the towns have different profiles, Cattus also got different attributes: in Nora, home to one of Sweden's oldest railways, he is a stationmaster cat; in Eksjö a building conservation cat; and in Hjo, a lakeside spa town, a bathing cat.

OnSpotStory wrote the scripts and handled the recording and sound production. To make the tours even more engaging, we added a picture puzzle: at each place Cattus finds an object, the objects are collected on a card, and at the end you can solve the puzzle.

The Tre Trästäder app was launched in 2021, and since then it has been filled with more walks in all three towns and a wooden-town classic tour, where drivers can visit all three towns and get tips along the roads in between.