Virtual Historic Cities, Dublin (SBIR)
Digital Heritage: StoryMaking R&D Project (Update)
After a bit of a lockdown delay, our Small Business Innovation Research project, Virtual Historic Dublin City, is getting back underway with the Office of Public Works (OPW).
One of the things we like to say is that museums and cultural organisations can tell the world’s most important stories, either because they are stories of world importance or they are the most important stories in the lives of the people telling them.
In 2021 and beyond, accessible digital technologies are playing an increasingly vital role in cultural sectors around the world, changing how, where and in what forms people can share and encounter heritage stories.
In the process, these technologies are transforming how creative, heritage and cultural organisations are planning and developing projects, how they communicate, as well as rethinking the types of experiences that will be valuable and value adding for their audiences.
This project has been and is an exciting process of working out what heritage organisations and their audiences need and want, at a time when those needs and ambitions (for organisations and audiences) are being faced with new and unprecedented challenges – COVID, travel restrictions and social distancing, decolonialisation, access to technologies, etc.
In the beginning…
In the initial phase of research we spoke with historians and heritage consultants in Ireland about the story of Dublin Castle and different ways that might be expressed in new ways using interactive and immersive storytelling technologies.
With UCL’s Bartlett School: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), we explored different types of open source and environmental data, developed workflows and analysed a wide range of digitally enhanced // delivered visitor experiences.
We found that, while the technologies have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, especially since the birth of the smartphone, the principles of what makes great storytelling, heritage interpretation and visitor experiences have remained strong.
The ways those principles can be expressed, however, have developed so far that the very mechanics of storytelling and visitor engagement are starting to take on new forms – the medium informing the message.
What happened next…
After this Discovery phase, we began to design what the actual visitor experience on-site at Dublin Castle (an any other OPW property) might be like.
This involved developing a core narrative framework that would make sense of a diverse range of content and interactivity, that not only works for Dublin castle, but has the potential to be rolled out across any // all of OPW’s 130+ heritage sites.
Our response was a conceit, so to speak.
The conceit was that we create an app that turns the visitor’s smartphone into a ‘scanning device’ that they can use to navigate to and around the castle, to search for, find and interact with a range of content, collect unique items, as well as creating and sharing memories.
In 2021…
The core goal of this project is to ‘democratise access’ to digital storytelling for heritage organisations or all shapes and sizes.
As such our target clients range from local and independent museums and local councils, through to national groups and portfolio heritage organisations like the OPW, SMG, the ABMC or the National Trust.
Working with creative developers at Discover Studios we are building on the findings and insights from the initial two phases – the key one being that while the technology is important, so is the workflow and both need to be designed with non-technical users in mind.
Our goal moving forward is to develop a versatile, accessible and easy to use new product (a step by step digital platform) and the accompanying support and service (a highly adaptive workflow associated with planning and creating content) that will enable any heritage organisation to ‘become more digital’.
This will need to be accepting of all the traditional assets and resources that cultural and heritage organisations have in spades – images and videos, oral history, documents and so on. Alongside this, we will focus on a compelling core set of AR features that make use of the most widely available types of (advanced) digital asset, such as 3D objects and models of buildings.
This new platform, and the story-making process that supports it, uses narrative-led interpretive principles developed over more than 30 years of cultural practise. Key to bringing these elements together as a compelling user experience will be the use of gamification and interactivity. One effective way to do this that we’ve found is to frame these experiences as a form of quest or treasure hunt, for example.
By making the latest interactive and immersive technologies more accessible for storytelling organisations, we are seeking to transform how and where people can create and engage with digital heritage and storytelling. In the process, this project seeks to be part of the ongoing conversation about the role of heritage organisations and the stories they can tell in our lives as individuals, communities and cultures.
