HeartHighland and scrAPPbook – Highland-based innovation in collaborative apps
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Presentation from Digital Transformation: Supporting Culture Shift in Museums by Verity Walker, Director of Interpreaction.
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HeartHighland and scrAPPbook – Highland-based innovation in collaborative apps
- 1. HeartHighland and scrAPPbook Having fun and innovating through two new collaborative app projects in the Highlands and Moray Verity Walker, Director, Interpretaction Projects Ltd
- 2. "O wad some Power the gift tae gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!“ Robert Burns, To a Louse
- 6. My heart’s in the Highlands – Homecoming 2014 • Highland Museums Forum, NTS, Highland Highlife larger museums, archives & libraries, independent heritage attractions in the Highlands and Moray such as steam railways, RSPB, WTS • Event grants of £250 triggered creativity • Training in social and digital media and collaborative working • Touring exhibition, ‘Needed on a Journey’ • Funded by MGS, HLF, Highland Council • New collaborative app (designed by XDesign in Edinburgh)
- 7. We wanted an app which would • Promote and interpret a geographical area to create clustered destinations without getting hung up on institutional boundaries • Allow visitors to choose a destination by themed interest or location (HeartHighland Explore) • Allow visitors to choose an event by its timing (HeartHighland Celebrate) • Show what was inside museums etc (ie the chocolates, not the box!) • Encourage visitors to feed back creatively using audio and photos (HeartHighland Share)
- 8. 300+ downloads to Iphone/Ipad June – October - would have been 2,500 + if it had been in Android too! 50+ participant sites/organisations 300+ events Shared creative photo/audio stream created – huge potential for more interactivity within collections etc.
- 9. BUT (why is there always a but…) • This was only a pilot one-year Homecoming 2014 project – not a three year project (better) or core-funded (the future) • No 2015 budget to redesign as an Android platform • No planning for ‘what happens next’ for the app and website – so website out-of-date, although this should change soon. So a waste of time? DEFINITELY NOT! • Huge steps forward in changing mindsets on digital technologies and collaboration generally • Friendships and professional links created • Greater awareness of the need to core-fund digital technology projects
- 10. Competitive collaborative concepts developed by teams of strangers can secure University of Dundee partnership funding visit www.designinaction.com and check out the Chiasma programmes – great CPD!
- 11. ScrAPPbook enables any community (including museum visitors) to create a collaborative view of how they see your location/site /collection using pre-set challenges, often against the clock
- 13. Potential scrAPPbook communities • museum & historic site (staff, visitors) • rural communities • schools • conferences • weddings • High Streets the list is endless… and completed ‘scrAPPbooks’ can be placed on the public scrAPPbook ‘shelf’
- 15. Find out more www.hearthighland.org www.facebook.com/hearthighland www.scrAPPbook.net www.facebook.com/scrAPPbookBadenoch @hearthighland, @scrAPPbooking @walker_verity verity@interpretaction.com +44 [0] 77789 22407
Editor's Notes
- My name is Verity Walker and I am a community engagement and interpretation consultant increasingly involved in digital technology projects for clients. Natural technophobe! Two app concepts, one piloted last year across the Highlands and Moray and one being piloted at present in Badenoch, within the Cairngorms National Park
- IWM background – wonderful but sometimes insular world, where change and especially technological change is not always seen as a positive thing. Bsed in Highlands. Volunteer-run museums. Sometimes we design projects based on what we ourselves want to do rather than what visitors might need. The first project, My heart’s in the Highlands, HeartHighland for short, has tried very hard to change that.
- Not all these county boundaries exist any more. I’m using this as an illustration of the way geographical boundaries and institutional boundaries may feel to us subliminally. 21 and 20 on this map is the tiny, beautiful area known as Moray, crammed with small, usually volunteer-run museums and heritage sites. It had never worked until our project with Highland, which covers 14,26,31 and 8 on the map. There are heritage organisations within these areas which have seldom or never partnered museums before – Woodland Trust Scotland, Foresrty Commission Scotland, RSPB, the National Trust for Scotland.
- To visitors, the map of Scotland may look more like this – a blur of experiences and memories, bucket-list destinations and experiences combined with unexpected encounters. Touring highland visitors in particular are time poor – you have to make it easy for them.
- It’s worth paying attention to what’s going on in the tourism sector generally at present. We’re going to see a lot of this rocket diagram, which shows that building on our capabilities, improving customer journeys and providing authentic experiences are part of all our futures. So how can digital technologies support authenticity?
- The HeartHighland app was a pilot element of this much larger 2014 Homecoming project which was intended to encourage collaboration. We were fortunate to select specialist app designers sympathetic to an inexperienced client group - and consultant.
- We found that ‘where’ and ‘when’ are more important to visitors than ‘what’. Allowing visitors to filter content by interest – for example, the Jacobites, or nature and outdoors – proved useful. On the whole, everything worked, but ideally we would fine-tune the app before rolling it out to Android.
- On the whole the app worked well. Our hotspot for downloads was anywhere with wifi in the café, like Culloden NTS. The app is designed to cache new download or upload content until the next connection to wifi, so the app then updates automatically.
- What would we do differently? Quite a lot – you know what needed to go in the original technology brief only when you’ve finished the pilot. Xdesign were patient and generous in allowing us room for tweaks. Digital technologies require core funding, not project funding, to allow for planning and progress, but try telling that to any cash-strapped local authority.
- This is what happened next. It’s nice for any consultant occasionally to indulge in a project of her own rather than on behalf of a client. I went along to a Chiasma, and was part of one of the project teams which secured funding to a maximum of £20K.
- This app screen shows how easy it is to upload scrAPPbook data to a central point. scrAPPbooking can be run over a long period of time, accumulating data gradually, or over a short period of time intensively to gamify the process.
- We’re discussing partnered development projects with a number of organisations at present and would hope to have the app available to license later in 2015.
- Ewan MacPherson is on the museum board of the Clan MacPherson museum in Newtonmore – he is in his 80s and had little interest in or knowledge of digital technology at the start of HeartHighland, has now become fully conversant with the app, even to the point of buying the hardware to showcase it. He is now a keen participant in scrAPPbook Badenoch.
- I would be happy to discuss either of these overlapping projects further with anyone who would like to get in touch.