The Russian North: Northern Tourism Through Design Professionals

Russia possesses generous tourism resources, but is somewhat lacking in ideas of how to render them available to consumers through the provision of business services. The variety of touristic resources per se is not a guarantee of a successful tourism industry. Over 60% of Russian territory is occupied by the north, an out-of-the-way land of natural and cultural extremes. Evidently, the notion of northern tourism requires a new approach to producing tourism products. The present-day shift “from consumption to experience” (Pine and Gilmore, 2005) entails a need to create a multi-focus “production team”. This paper presents the author's findings obtained within the framework of a major research project undertaken by a group of Master's degree students at the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2005–2007 with the aim of exploring the touristic potential of the Western-Siberian north. The study is about the potential input of design professionals into the tourism industry and is an attempt to take an external look at interdisciplinary cooperation. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to present a hypothetical model of touristic transport network developed by designers.