Madmen’s Voices: Discovering Former Psychiatric Hospitals via Mobile Application

摘要

The aim of this paper is to present the realization of a mobile application as a support to the visit to the former psychiatric hospitals in the cities of Siena and Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy. Due to the unique nature of the place to be recounted, the design phase of the application has paid special attention to the definition of the multimedia material to be provided to the users: through the use of oral sources, i.e. interviews with the former hospital employees collected over the last 15 years, the app tries to implement the paradigm of Augmented Cultural Heritage, enriching the visit to a Tangible Cultural Site - the hospital - with additional Intangible Cultural Assets, in this case the narrations made by the people who experienced in first person the life inside a psychiatric hospital.