Digital Storytelling at Staunton Country Park (Parks for People)

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been working on a Country Park Transformation project with five country parks in Hampshire. This little video shows a recording session from this summer with historian, Steve Jones, sharing his insights as to what makes Staunton Country Park a special place.

As part of the NLHF development for Staunton Country Park, including a new interpretative strategy, landscaping, exhibition and community spaces, we’ve created a flexible and evolving digital storytelling platform linked to the new waysfinding and signage around the park, leaflets and maps.

Staunton are using this platform for mapping and sharing stories about the park – past, present and future – supporting visitors to explore and finding new ways for the park’s communities to connect with each other and tap into nature.

Starting with the core narrative, ‘we make the park and the park makes us’, and concept of ‘voices in the park’, we have been exploring different ways of creating space for any // all the Park People (staff, local residents and park visitors) to speak about what Staunton means for them, as well as sharing their passion for the place and its living history.

We’ve also had the pleasure of working with local charity, East Hants Mind, to create a new location-based Mindfulness Trail through the park, seeking to highlight the park’s role in contributing to the mental health and wellbeing of people who live around, work at or visit it.

During the summer, we wanted to capture the spaces and natural sounds of the park and to record participants in the places they are speaking about. This approach enhances the sense that these voices are embedded in and emerging from the park.

In these socially distant times, it’s been interesting finding ways to maintain the intimacy of the digital storytelling experience, whilst ensuring that we follow all the guidelines and recommendations.

Sometimes, this simply means sitting a little farther away from each other, however, we’ve found that providing the technology and training in context for clients to do this work themselves is far more empowering and sustainable.

Digital Storytelling is a very flexible and powerful tool. You can do it in very high end and fine artsy ways or more organic, rough and ready sorts of ways depending on your needs and intended outcomes. You can also use digital storytelling for all sorts of community engagement and building activities, as well as very practical problem solving and communication needs.

If you were going to use digital storytelling, What might you use it for and What might your story be?