Monday 3 June, 3pm

Jocelyn Spence, Benjamin Bedwell & Dimitri Darzentas (Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham)

‘Ideation for Heritage Visitor Experiences: Creating a global community knowledgebase through card-play’

(NB. 2 hour workshop)

Abstract

Working with 7 cultural heritage institutions around the UK, the Mixed Reality Lab has built a platform to facilitate a participatory, user-driven means of designing visitor experiences. Its core function is to pool resources and minimise costs from resource-strained organisations. We propose a 2-hour workshop for museum professionals to get hands-on experience with VisitorBox (visitorbox.org), the heritage-specific card deck that structures the process for professionals to generate and develop concepts for visitor engagement. Participants will work in groups through the five-stage table-top VisitorBox card activity to characterise visitors, define institutional goals, detail a design brief, generate ideas for visitor experiences, and critique those ideas. For the first time, we will pair VisitorBox with our novel open-source platform, Cardographer. Cardographer aids ideation by providing contextual information about each card via an augmented reality interface. Cardographer then digitises design outputs to create an ever-growing knowledgebase that can be accessed through a simple web interface. This offers real-time feedback on design ideas and digitally preserves them to prevent the loss of important insights due to time constraints or staffing changes. Cardographer also enables a long-term view of design activities across participating organisations through interactive visualisations that uncover patterns of use, common challenges, and unexploited opportunities. Combining VisitorBox with Cardographer can create a global knowledgebase of design ideas and outcomes driven by heritage sector professionals. Cardographer invites participation from representatives of any heritage institution in any role. It scales up to ambitious, cutting-edge technological concepts as well as scaling down to modest, tried-and-true, no-tech implementations. Heritage professionals will build confidence with technology by leveraging their own skills and the examples of others in their sector with minimal financial or human resource investment. Workshop participants will learn by doing and walk away with tangible benefits based on their own experiences, concerns, and inspirations.