Design synthesis: working with volunteers

In a way, my project at Chawton was an example of Research though Design (RtD), so among the papers I have been pointed to for my corrections is another example, which is interesting for the historic house museums that I have spent a good part of my life working with. The paper is: CLAISSE, C. , DULAKE, N. & PETRELLI, D.. 2019. Research Through Design. Digital Heritage International Congress. Research Through Design.

This paper explores to co-creation process that fed into an Interactive Tablaux project at Bishops House museum in Sheffield. The research was multiphase and involved volunteers at every stage. First of all, by the designer becoming a volunteer and working alongside them. Then but then gifting of a Creative Package to ten volunteers. The package featured six activities or “Design Probes” to encourage the volunteers’ input. The probes started of straightforward but got more creative in sequence. “For example, Best wishes (probe 1)
invited them to write about their experience at the House by sending us back a postcard; My dream exhibition (probe 3) featured a map and personalised sketchbook to share their favourite stories and museum
objects; Seed wish (probe 5) used the metaphor of growth to prompt their imagination about future scenarios for the museum.”

Although the output of the design was inspiring the researcher found it challenging to move to “the phase of ideation.” However the response to the first design probe moved the work on somewhat – the researcher synthesised a visual volunteer manifesto (which took the form of a sort of wordcloud) from the the volunteers responses. This shed light on the personal, emotional and social dimensions of volunteering, and proved to be a catalyst for discussion. The outputs of probe three became a three dimensional model, mapping the volunteers favourite spot and things in three dimensions. Such models are often made far later in the creative process, when a proposal for a final exhibition is being visualised.

The Creative Package was followed by a series of workshop with volunteers – the first one speculating on what a day in the life of previous inhabitants might have looked like – which produced as an output a number of imagined portmanteaux characters. Conversations were recorded, but not transcribed. Instead the researcher draw in response to the recoded conversation. “drawing made more sense than producing a written transcription as the sketches captured the complexity and non-linear aspects of participants’ conversation. Their unfinished quality presented the characters in a state of becoming, revealing the negotiations and compromises participants made during the co- creation workshop.”

From these drawings the researcher produced a storyboard consisting of three to five illustrated scenes for each character, which were used in the subsequent workshop, with a smaller group fo volunteers to refine the stories and check accuracy. This gave substance to the characters and defined their personality. Finally the personas were shared with the curator of social history to select appropriate objects from the collection to pair with each character.

Each stage of co-creation had a virtual output, the Design Synthesis which both recorded the output of the preceding stage and prompted the development of the subsequent one. The authors of the paper reflect on design synthesis as a tool for making sense of co-creation, bringing the richness together and nurturing collective creativity. They quote the volunteer organiser saying “What I found really interesting is how volunteers’ ideas were determining the format and outcome of the project. They [the volunteers] could really see the contributions they have made in the end result.” One of the volunteers said “It’s lovely the way you [the designer] have involved the volunteers, used our ideas and made us part of it.”

Personalising the heritage visit

One the things that my external examiner pointed out during my viva is that I had not put in enough about personalisation. A number of the articles that she recommended I look at for my corrections address that issue and this is one. Not, Elena & Petrelli, Daniela. 2018. Blending customisation, context-awareness and adaptivity for personalised tangible interaction in cultural heritage. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 114: 3-19. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.01.001.

I think one of the reasons why I had somewhat skimmed over the subject in my thesis is, coming out of a career based on live interpretation, which is essentially a conversation, personalisation is built into the way I think about heritage. My work in the PhD might be summed up as trying to ensure that conversation takes place even when there isn’t an excellent live interpreter working there. Of course, my examiner, Daniella is coming at the same aim, but from a different direction, and so she does not take personalisation for granted as I am wont to do. This paper however is a useful resource looking at it from the HCI point of view and I think there will be a number of quote from it and a summary among my corrections. But which quotes? What is summarised? As you might already have guessed these posts are a first pass at answering those questions. A Bit of practise as it were before creating a restructured version of my thesis. So, the paper starts off asking what personalisation actually means in this context:

“‘Personalisation’ is a broad term that encompasses three types ofsystem behaviour: adaptability (also called customisation, the term we use hereafter) offers users a number of options to set up the application/system the way they like it; context-awareness is the ability of the system to sense the current state of the environment and to respond accordingly; adaptivity implies the system maintains a dynamic model of the on-going interaction and dynamically changes its own behaviour to adapt to the changing situation.”

I can see why they chose to call adaptability customisation, adaptivity sounds far too similar and might be confusing. Of course one factor we have to consider is that although people do make heritage visits on their own, the vast majority are as part of a group; self-organised like couples, families, or friendship groups; or organised groups such as school visits and coach tours. As the authors point out “Research that directly addresses the social dimension is still limited” but they point the way to studies that look at conversation around a context aware-table, and sharing tables around a group, among others. However it is important to include this social dimension in any consideration of personalisation, which is something I did at Chawton – the choice there were made by the visiting “group” even if, sometimes that ‘group’ consisted of one person.

The paper of course starts with some case studies of similar work, including the Italian trenches soundscape I looked at a couple of days back. In another project at the same museum uses a “pebble” with NFC capability that activates media when places in certain places around the museum. When the visitor leaves, the pebble’s journey is read and a personalised postcards printed for the user to take home. In the Hague, a similarly NFC enabled system has the user place replica objects in “an interactive ring” which plays media from a choice of three different viewpoints (two military and one civilian). A third project, The Loupe, uses a phone disguised as a magnifying glass to present AR media. My problem with all these is an HCI one, two these systems force the users to learn a new interface, placing the pebble or replica in a certain spot to activate media that seems unintuitive, especially in environments where conditioned behaviour often precludes touch, picking things up, or even putting things on museum surfaces. On the other hand, the authors do make a point later that “A synergy can be created with tangible and embodied interactions to increase visitors’ awareness they are building their own visit path.” And I must admit that when the personalisation is invisible, the visitors do not perceive it. However my evaluation of Ghosts in the Garden suggest that even when tangible interactions are involved, the visitors may still not be aware that their experience was personalised.

But leaving my issues aside. There is some really good overview stuff in this – including a table that summarises some of the factors to consider when personalising interpretation. This includes: “stable” visitor factors – like age and disability, interests and Learning preferences; factors related to the current visit – motivations, fatigue, visit history and available time etc.; the type of tracking – two in this table, proximity tracking and interaction with objects; the location – indoor or outdoors, layout, noise etc.; and the content – the media, the story.

The team brought together 25 participants in a co-design workshop (curators , computer scientists and engineers) and they came up with a classification of features by the type of personalisation they support. The first group includes features that depend on content and are activated by “customisation preparation”: is this about on-site visits or virtual visits? Is it indoors or outdoors? What are constraints – is there power and wifi? The next set is decided by the curator or interpretation staff, Most of these come under “customisation preparation” too: what is the heritage topic?; The media type?; the genre of the text?; The thematic threads?; the supported visitor profiles? the type of group? Then what is the structure of the narrative, for example a story or a Q&A? Finally what is the structure of the visit? For example, is it guided, free exploration, or a treasure hunt?

One curatorial decision that falls into context awareness is does the interaction involve augmented objects, an if so wha are input and output abilities of those objects? were I the curator on this project I would look for forms of content awareness which do not rely on objects, even though some I have written about elsewhere are fun. But that move me into a set of context awareness features that are modelled by the system itself (according to the authors): user location, proximity to exhibits, proximity to other users, and the current state of the exhibits. To give the experience the adaptivity it needs, the he system will also use data about the shorty of the individual interactions with the space/objects and delivered content – just as in my Chawton experiment the system selected content based on what had been shared with the user before.

Finally comes the customisation choices, chosen, or course by the visitor and based on their motivation and expectations. They might have been given the opportunity to express interest in topics and narrative threads, as I did (somewhat clumsily) with my Clandon prototype. And, as at Chawton, the expected a duration of the visit is a factor (though I suggest it is less an active choice of the visitor, and better modelled by the system). Of course another factor that is totally out of the control of anyone other than the visitor is what the visitor thinks the type of visit is – they might be coming for an emotional reason, or social, or fun or for learning.

The paper concludes that “fully automatic adaptivity, where the system takes all the decisions on what to present to which visitor, when and how, may not be the best solution” and argues that therefore what curators (or interpreters) value as most meaningful should be the driver of of the personalisation model. I agree, but with the proviso that if the intent is top emotional engage the visitor, many heritage stories don’t do the job well enough. The authors say “This requires a radical rethinking of how personalisation in cultural heritage manifests itself and the role curators and visitors play” and I think think that my thesis might contribute to that rethinking.

Heritage Soundscapes

At my viva my external examiner pointed me towards this interesting paper, which she had co-authored – partly, I think, as an example of how I should restructure the discussion of my Chawton experiment in my thesis. But it contains some real gems ( like “the museums studies literature points out the restorative value of an aesthetic experience that is clear of any information acquisition or learning objective and is centred instead on the sensorial experience of being there”) that makes me regret missing it in my literature review: Marshall, M. , PETRELLI, D., DULAKE, N., NOT, E., MARCHESONI, M., TRENTI, E. & PISETTI, A.. 2015. Audio-based narratives for the trenches of World War I : intertwining stories, places and interaction for an evocative experience. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 27-39.

It’s a case study of a prototype “visitor­ aware personalised multi­point auditory narrative system that automatically plays sounds and stories depending on a combination of features such as physical location, visitor proximity and visitor preferences” Voices from the Trenches for a First World War exhibition at the Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra in Italy. What particularly interest me is that its part of the Mesch project which has some other outcomes which I refer to in my thesis. The paper describes their intent to move away from what they call “the information­ centric approach of cultural heritage.” I am sure a number of my professional colleagues would bridle somewhat at this accusation. After all, did not Tilden tell us in the 50’s that interpretation was more than mere information? But one od the things that my Chawton experiment uncovered was that actually too much “interpretation” turns out to be mere information after all.

The authors summarise previous experiments in responsive soundscapes, such as LISTEN, which “composes a soundscape of music and/or commentaries depending on the detected visitor’s behaviour: visitors that are not close or are moving are classified as unfocussed and for them a soundscape is created, while visitors that are standing still and close to the artwork are classified as focussed and a narrative (e.g. the curator describing the artwork) is played over the headphones.” Though many soundscapes are delivered by headphone, to avoid sound pollution for other visitors, the interesting project SottoVoce is designed around eavesdropping on what other people in our party are listening to. Half the respondents (in groups of two) heard the soundscape from each others phone speakers, while the other half had headphones. “When in loudspeaker mode visitors focussed on what was displayed on the screen of the mobile device and stayed close to the sound source while partners linked via the same audio on their headphones had a more dynamic visit driven by each other’s interest in the exhibits.”

“The ability to convey and evoke emotion is a fundamental aspect of sound” they say, and explain “The affective power of voice and audio storytelling has been recognised as creating a connection to the listener and is even amplified when spoken words are not coupled with the visual capture of the storyteller, creating a sense of intimacy and affective engagement.” An they built their soundscapes using the same sort of mix of music, speech and other sounds that I used (in a limited fashion) at Chawton. Some of the primary source material was recorded to sound more like oral history, with actors reading the words “with palpable emotion” to be more affective. The responsiveness is similar to that of LISTEN, but the “staying still” metric isn’t used, instead a simpler proximity method is used. woven into that soundscape are voice recordings for attentive listening, which is selected by the visitor choosing from a selection of cards. The sound was delivered by loudspeakers but, unlike SottoVoce, not on people’s own devices, rather places around the site. This was what I did for Chawton UNtours too.

The particular challenge with this project was that it was outdoors.The difficulties of maintaining equipment, connecting power and data etc means that most sites resort to delivering via mobile device. But on the other hand: “While engagement in a museum tends to be via prolonged observation, in an outdoor setting multiple senses are stimulated: there is the physical, full­body experience of being there, the sight and the sound of the surroundings, possibly the smell too. The multi-sensory setting places the visitor in direct connection with the heritage and enables engagement at an emotional, affective level rather than at a pure informative level.” (p6) The danger of using a mobile device to deliver interpretation is one I wrote about here, but essentially it stake them out of the where they are, it is the antithesis off presence.

With all this in mind the designers of the project set out five clear principles:

• To engage at multiple levels, not just cognitive
• To focus the visitors’ attention on the heritage, not the technology
• To deal with group dynamics sensibly
• To be provocative and surprise visitors, but design simple and straightforward interactions
• To personalize content on the basis of clear conditions

The choice of sound over anything screen-based was an outcome of the second principle. Loudspeakers rather than headphones was also an attempt to focus attention on the heritage: “During a small experiment in a local outdoor heritage site, we observed that audio creates a wider attraction zone where passers­by become aware of the sound source, and a closer engagement zone around the emitting point where one has to stop and listen in order to understand what the voice says.”

So they designed a soundscape that featured music nd sound to attract visitor to a location and then vice recording to hold them there. The narratives are arranged thematically, with different voices (authoritative and intimate) indicating the nature of the content. Quite how the visitor chooses is not really made clear but I expect it is by approaching the voices that most attract them.

The team trialed the idea by observing the visitors behaviour using about 23 minutes of content, but I was disappointed that they did not come up with any solutions to the problems we encounter trying to evaluate the soundscape at The Vyne. It is hard to observe and distinguish between active listening and background listening. The authors seen to assume that if the active listening content is playing, then the partiocilapants are actively listening. The only evidence they have for this is a qualitative questionnaire, which I am not convinced is an accurate measure on engagment. Yes they said they enjoyed an benefitted from the experience, but if they did not know that was what was being tested, what proportion would have even mentioned the soundscape.

Of course they identified a number of challenges, not least fine-tuning the volume to be loud enough to attract attention and yet not so loud to cause discomfort. This is especially true of the different voices, with some by necessity quieter and more intimate. Of course they also predicted issues overs scalability – similar to the ones I planned fro but wasn’t able to properly test at Chawton “how well would such a system work in a busy environment with many groups interacting.”

A Thank You to the Chawton team

Not the most flattering photo of me ever, as I give an Untour, with Ryan observing. Photo: © Chawton House Library/Darren Bevin

Well, that turned out to be be more exhausting than I had expected. It went very well though. Only one of the visitor (group)s that I approached chose not to come on an Untour, and that was just because they were short on time, having come to see the village’s open gardens as well as the “Great House”. That was on the last day, and was more than made up for by a visitor actually requesting an Untour in the final minutes before last entry. She was very effusive with her appreciation, and indeed, every participant seems to enjoy the tours, despite my pauses as I waited for the wi-fi to catch up with us.

What caught me by surprise (though it shouldn’t have) was the energy required when engaging with the public all day. I say it shouldn’t have, because I used to do that for a job at Hampton Court Palace. But I didn’t come home from that job quite as exhausted as I felt by the end of the week. Maybe I’m just that much older, and more out of shape, or maybe the extra work of limiting my interactions to what the “natom database” defined used more brainpower. But as it turned out all I wanted was to sleep through Sunday. And Monday actually, but I had to go to work.

But this post isn’t all about me. Other people devoted energy to the success of the project too. I want to take this opportunity to thank everybody involved at Chawton, all the staff of course, especially Darren Bevin the librarian, but also the volunteers William and Yvette and intern Ryan. Ryan has, moments ago, sent me his notes from observing a numbers of tours, and he also filmed a good number of tours which give me a few hours of video evidence to analyse too (just as soon as I can find somewhere to securely store all those gigs of data!). I’d also like to thank all the participants who willingly because my test subjects.

Now I have to get my head around all that analysis,which means coding the evidence with Atlas TI (which means learning Atlas TI) and start writing it up. At the same time, I need to edit/rewrite my incredibly long first chapter in my thesis into three or four chapters, plus an introduction. Which I need to have done by the end of next month. The write up of the experiment and the results I have a little longer to do, I’m thinking the end of September. So this week, I’ll make sure my data is filed property and the video stored securely and backed up a couple of times. Then I’ll leave off thinking about Chawton for a while, and go back to Scrivener to get my thesis in shape for the upgrade, which I’ll need to organise for December.

 

Chawton Untours live: progress review

Its a rainy day today, and so Chawton House Library is seeing very few visitors. I guess that many visitors come to the village to visit the Jane Austen museum, and if it’s dry a good proportion of them follow that up with the short stroll to the Library. But when it rains, with the choice of a warm and dry pub OR a cafe just across the road from the Jane Austen Museum, I guess most people decide they don’t want to brave the weather to come here.

The quiet afternoon does give me the opportunity to reflect on Untours so far. The first thing to note is how helpful every visitor I’ve approached as been. Not one has refused to let me give them an Untour. They have also been helpful on the tours, clearly expresing their interest in objects etc. I wonder how much their behaviour is changed by their awareness of  being observedt, but I don’t think, in the final analysis, that will matter very much for what I get out of the experiment. They’ve also been very patient and forgiving when the (somewhat flaky) wi-fi takes time to get up to speed.

I have the minimum number of volunteers, so I’m currently doing all the Untours, with the volunteers (Ryan doing most of it, and Yvette and William from Chawton’s own volunteer body helping out when Ryan isn’t around) in an observer role, either taking notes or filming the exchange. It does mean that one thing I wanted to test – where two groups come into the same space with different story needs – isn’t something I’ll be able to learn about this time.

I’m not going to make firm conclusions here, not until I’ve had a chance to look at all the evidence, but there are some observations I’ve aleady made. One such is that it seems so far that trying to direct people’s attention my turning lights on is having little or no effect. This maybe because most days, the lights don’t make much difference in the naturally and artificially lit rooms of Chawton House Library. Today, with the gloomier weather, my lights are all more noticable, and I was hoping to see if they finally did start attracting visitors’ attention. But I’ve only given one Untour so far today…

Music/sound seems to be working well*, sometimes the visitors’ behaviour keeps it in the background and sometimes they actively listen. It will be interesting to look back on the week’s notes and films and see if there’s any indications whether particular pieces of music trigger specific responses.

*My wizard of Oz solution for the music isn’t brilliantly reliable – I set the music running, and then set the relevant speaker. The music is all on-line, short pieces on Scalar itself, and bigger files on an AWS server I recently set up for an entirely unrelated podcast. Occasionally one of the servers (I’m not sure yet but I think its only the Scalar one) takes so long to deliver the music that my device (an iPad) raids its own music library for something to put on the speaker. The first time this happened, it was Adele’s heavy piano chords, so I notice in time to stop it and go back to the Austen themed piano pieces that should have played. Subsequently I deleted the iPad’s entire music library, but just yesterday it managed to drag up the Pretenders from somewhere.

Halfway through this post we got a visitor who happily joined my tour, and she was followed by another very interesting couple. So I didn’t manage to finish writing the above until now, Friday morning. Ryan collected a lot of video evidence today, with everyone consenting to be filmed, so that will be interesting to look back on.

Chawton Untours launch

The exhibits are in place, the interactive script is done, the sound files are all uploaded to the server and the lights and speakers are all in place and plugged in. In a little under an hour* we launch Chawton Untours.

The weather is a bit wet and windy today, so its anybody’s guess now many visitors will brave the elements to come to Chawton House Library. But a slow start will might be for the best – I’m sure there will be some snagging today as visitors make choices I haven’t predicted in the script.

The beauty of Scalar though is that I can make changes quickly on-line and they’ll be in place for the next Untour. Indeed this whole experiment is to uncover and solve problems, the sort of problems future “ambient interpretation” algorithms will need to deal with.

You can help by coming to Chawton and joining an Untour. We’re running the experiment until Saturday 10th June. If you are reading this, and can get  to the house (near Alton), I’d love to welcome you.

*Well actually, although I wrote that an hour before opening, I’m about to publish this post just before closing. 

Recruiting volunteer Unguides

I’m thinking today about what I’m asking of volunteers for my Chawton Untours project. I’m starting a little, but not too, late. From a critical path point of view, I’d have been better to get this started a couple of weeks ago, but given that would have been right in the middle of the Easter break for the university, when most of the undergrad body were away, I’ve not lost too much by putting out the call now.

First of all, how many do I need? One is tempted to say “I’ll make do with however many I get,” but lets think about what would be ideal. I hope to run this at Chawton for a week, in order to capture a decent sample of visitors. The house is not open on Saturdays, so we might actually only be looking at six days. At any one time I’d prefer to have three Unguides operating at the same time. Part of the experiment is to explore how two or more parties in the same space with different story needs would negotiate who gets priority. You can’t do that if you don’t have two or more parties in operation at the same time. I need volunteers on week days between 12 noon and 4.30 pm. That’s not too onerous. But on Sundays, I’d need them between 11 and 5. Lets assume right now that not every Sunday volunteer will want to do all day, in which case we need two shifts of volunteers. If each volunteer only wants to do it once, that’s fifteen for the weekdays, and six for Sunday. Twenty-one. Yikes!

But that’s not all, I’d like an observer as well, recording both participant and Unguide behaviours, so lets add one of those per day, and we’re up to 27. And ideally I’d like another volunteer each day to handle the welcome, explanation and paperwork, another six then, making the total 33. Double yikes!

But as I said, that’s the ideal. I can make do with less if need be… I do want to try for five people on each day, but I could get away with fewer, even reducing the number of days of operation if its tough. Given the short term nature of the project I’ll put all the dates in and ask people to state which they might be available for when they express an interest.

So, what’s in it for the volunteers?

• You get to work in the lovely surroundings of Chawton House, so much in the heart of Jane Austen Country, that she used to live next door (OK, not quite next door).
• You get experience of working with the public in the heritage sector (so I ought to bring this to attention of tourism and leisure students too).
• You get to explore and extend the idea of adaptive narrative (this one for the ECS students)
• Lunch will be provided on the activity days.

And what do I need?

• I’m looking for people with emotional energy, confident with speaking to the public
• Knowledge of the site is not a requirement, the adaptive script will provide everything you need to say
• A reasonably up-to-date smartphone or tablet is required. The adaptive script will be delivered via Chawton’s wi-fi through your mobile device’s browser (any mobile operating system should work, but Android and Windows devices will benefit from DLNA connectivity)
• Ability to climb stairs will be needed, although there is a role that can be static, based on the ground floor.
• Availability on one of more of Sunday 4th, Monday 5th, Tuesday 6th, Wednesday 7th, Thursday 8, or Friday 9th is required.
• There may be one or two opportunities for training on before  Sunday 4th, on dates and in locations to be agreed.
• The project is at Chawton House library, in Chawton, near Alton. Access to your own transport will be an advantage.

So, I just need to put all that on a flyer.

Abstract: Digital Personalisation for Heritage Consumers

I’m speaking at the upcoming Academy of Marketing E-Marketing SIG Symposium: ‘Exploring the digital customer experience:  Smart devices, automation and augmentation’ on May 23 2017. This is what I wrote for my abstract:

Relevance to Call: Provocation, Smart Devices. Augmentation of the Customer Experience

Objective: A work-in-progress research development project at Chawton House explores narrative structure, extending the concept of story Kernels and Satellites to imagine the cultural heritage site as a collection of narrative atoms, or Natoms, both physical (spaces, collection) and ephemeral (text, video, music etc.). Can we use story-gaming techniques and digital mobile technology to help physical and ephemeral natoms interact in a way that escapes the confines of the device’s screen?

Overview: This provocation reviews the place of mobile and location technologies in the heritage market. Digital technology and social media are in the process of transforming the way that the days out market is attracted to cultural heritage places. But on site, the transformation is yet to start. New digital interventions in the heritage product have not caught on with the majority of heritage consumers. The presentation will survey the current state of digital heritage interpretation and especially the use location-aware technologies such as Bluetooth LE, NFC, or GPS. Most such systems deliver interpretation media to the device itself, over the air or via a prior app download. We explore some of the barriers to the use of mobile devices in the heritage visit – the reluctance to download proprietary apps, mobile signal and wifi complexities and most importantly, the “presence antithesis” the danger that the screen of the device becomes a window that confines and limits the user’s sensation of being in the place and among the objects that they have come to see. Also, while attempts to harness mobile technology in the heritage visit display interpretation that is both more relevant, and in some cases more personalised to the needs of the user, they also tend towards a “narrative paradox” – the more the media is tailored to the movements of the user around the site, the less coherent and engaging the narrative becomes.

Method: Story-games can show us how to create an experience that balances interactivity and engaging story, giving the user complete freedom of movement around the site while delivering the kernels of the narrative in an emotionally engaging order. At Chawton we plan to “wizard of oz” an adaptive narrative narrative for that place’s visitors.

Findings: Work so far demonstrates that a primary challenge for an automated system will be negotiating the contended needs of different groups and individuals within the same space. The work at Chawton looks to address this.

**

This is the first time I’ve written an abstract in this format, and I found it quite a challenge. What you add in and leave out is always a difficult decision, and this format, which was limited to one side, had me opting to leave out the references which I might have made room for if I had not had to write something under each of the prescribed headings. It’s also the first time I have had formal feedback on an abstract, which I share below:

Relevance to call: Good fit Smart devices, user experience,
augmentation, culture (5)
Objective: A practical case example of augmentation in a
heritage setting (5)
Lit rev: No indication of theory used, as this is a practical
case study (n/a)
Method: A specific case of Chawton House presented. (5)
Results: Interesting findings re barriers to use of mobile
devices in heritage, and the experience evaluation (4)
Generalisations: Interesting and original context of heritage
institution using augmentation, can extend to
other heritage sector applications. (4)
Total 23/25

**

So, not a bad score, but I wonder what I would have got (out of 30?) if I had included the references. Does the bibliography count within the one page limit? Or, could I have included it on a second side?

Still, not time for those questions. I have the write the actual presentation now. 🙂

Untours moved to June

I had a great meeting with Gillian Dow at Chawton today. To be honest, I’d been worrying about it for weeks, knowing that the story development was in no state to be complete in time to run the even in March as we had agreed. I’d even been nervous about contacting Gillian, knowing I was letting the Library down on a promise I’d made last year. But worrying was not going to solve anything, so I bit the bullet last week, and wrote a short email explaining my problem, and fixing today’s meeting.

Gillian was very understanding, and we’ve fixed a new date for the experiment – the week between the 4th June and the 11th. But not only that, I think we cracked one of the main story problems I’d been having. Gillian went straight to the crux of my problem: that Montague Knight seems the obvious character to hang the story of the house upon, and yet his own biography doesn’t quite offer the emotional arc that I was looking for. Though he wrote (with his cousin, William Austen Leigh) the history of Chawton and its owners, its stops short of his own time there, and the emotion beat of loss happens after he dies, childless.

But it doesn’t, Gillian pointed out. Yes, Montague’s home improvement efforts at Chawton all seem positive and upbeat, but they are counterweighted by the loss of the home he grew up in family seat. When he was 30 his father, Edward, sold the family’s Kent home, Godmersham Park. Suddenly, all the work Montague put in at Chawton gets an extra significance. And there’s an emotional beat, loss, which can resonate in the story of the dismemberment of Godmersham and Chawton’s libraries. It could also celebrate the news of some of that collection, a 1833 “Bently” set of Austen’s work with Montague’s bookplates in, being donated back to Chawton.

In other news I also tested the out the wifi plug controller and speaker with Chawton’s network, and they both worked. So all in all, it was a VERY good morning.

*Edited to reflect my realization that Montagu didn’t grow up in Godmersham – his father lived with this family in Chawton from 1826.

Forgive me, this will make little sense

I feel I need to record this here, but I fear it will be nonsense to most of my readers. Looking back at it it feels like the first step into incoherent PhD madness. So skip this one if you are looking for sense and inspiration.

I’m struggling with the Chawton project, tying myself up into narrative knots. Meanwhile my collaborator Ed is powering on with his part. Today I’ve been listen to his first pass at a number of audio mixes. Which sound great by the way, and make me a bit depressed at the lack of progress my part has been making.

The problem is all to do with the paradox of scripting an emergent story. When I brief Ed part of wants to say, “we’ll tell this bit of the story in this room, and so you need to use this sound,” but that defeats my object of trying to create stories with some sense of order whatever route visitors take through a place. So I wrote Ed a short but still rambling email, that I think captures what I’m getting at. Though it might be bollocks.

Anyhow I don’t want to lose it. And so since I started this blog as a notebook, rather than a finished demonstration of my finely honed wisdom, you  are about to get an actual note to self, the slightly edited text of that email. We can all work out what it means, if anything at all, later:

I’ve had a little epiphany thinking about your question. But I’m finding it difficult to put into words.  You asked whether the six beats are connected to the recorded quotes. I said no, and I still think that but I also said that a couple might be relevant, and so they might, BUT (I think) not so relevant that you should mix them into the finished work. The ones I was thinking of were: Fanny Knight, Mr Knightly and Jane Austen. But none of those enhance any one particular beat, do you get me? So don’t need to be missed in so they are heard every time. The beats set the mood, or rather, illustrate a particular mood. So… I think we’ve looking for sound mixes that accompany the beats, eg Loneliness. In the fancy system that doesn’t exist yet, the system might choose to interweave the “lonely” track with the Fanny Knight quote. But we don’t need to do that, or rather to fix it as that, in our rough and ready version.

But that lead me to another thought. (The Epiphany.) Which is that we (I) can’t afford to put speakers everywhere. So we need to select rooms that we are putting speakers in, and for each room WITH A SPEAKER, create a choice of soundmixes, that match the whatever beat the operator (the Unguide in our case, a fancy system in the future) chooses in that Room.

So, day we have a ball in the Great Hall – at the very basic level we might have a choice of a Jolly mix (for Up beats), or a sad mix (for setbacks), do you get me? We could have six different mixes for the six beats I’ve identified ALL for the Great Hall, so that whichever beat is selected has its own music appropriate for the great hall, and ANOTHER six choices for, say, The Oak Room. Am I making sense? But of course we’ve actually got three stories, and even if they all share the first beat, that would mean a possible five mixes for the Library story, and ANOTHER five for the Montague story, for EACH room? Crazy huh?

But all of that could be a LOT of work for you, so we need to keep our ambitions in check.

SO:

Tell me how many mixes you want to create, and together we can decide on a limited number of rooms where we’ll put speakers (we did day nine, but I can live with just one), and a limited number of mixes for each speaker (I think we want at least two for this experiment). How does that sound?