Three researchers associated with LoGaCulture have recently been up to some interesting tasks at in the UK and the Island of Madeira.
As LoGaCulture gains steam, and some of the preparatory work required to start designing those promising locative games wraps up, Anna Bertmark and Mathilde Gouin have been gathering numerous voices in co-producing these exciting interactive tools. At our UK case-study and at the Island of Madeira (in Portugal), Bertmark and Gouin have added their own creative touch to LoGaCulture’s ultimate ambition of engaging ever greater and more varied publics with Europe’s cultural heritage and natural wealth.
Their first step was to implement their own approach to the Research through Design (RtD) methodology articulated by Carnegie Mellon University’s John Zimmerman and colleagues back in 2007: a hands-on, creative approach to research that leverages the act of designing itself as a means of inquiry and discovery, particularly useful for exploring complex, multifaceted problems where traditional research methods may fall short. Following that exploratory road, the two researchers have produced a series of tools that, once implemented across the UK and Portuguese case-studies, will supply LoGaCulture’s interactive technologies and human-computer interaction colleagues with the data they need to start crafting bespoke locative games for both locations and their unique publics.
Using their design backgrounds and ingenious brains, Bertmark and Gouin designed cultural probes and sensory maps based on the beautiful UK case-study sites. Created through co-design workshops with local stakeholders, cultural probes and sensory maps are two research and design methods that help uncover rich insights into users’ unique experiences and contexts. Cultural probes provide participants with a set of open-ended and creative tasks, such as journals, cameras, or artistic materials, encouraging them to document their daily lives, thoughts, feelings, and cultural contexts, while sensory maps help researchers visualize and understanding users’ emotional responses and sensory perceptions within specific environments or situations as participants negotiate their way across a physical location. This set of tools developed by Bertmark and Gouin, once deployed, will facilitate the co-production of the locative technologies and transmedia narratives crafted for both sites, helping them become more user-centered and inclusive, potentially resonating with diverse user groups to a much higher extent while offering meaningful, culturally enriched interactions.
In a Madeira workshop this past August, Bertmark and Gouin co-designed an adaptation of their probes and map — initially designed for the local UK context — to the uniqueness of the Portuguese garden island.
Simultaneously, Maritza Silva, another LoGaCulture-associated researcher, has been trying to understand what visitors think of the Madeira Levadas — a collective 2200 km set of irrigation canals that function as hiking trails across the island — as they make their way through them. By gathering personal narratives in the form of auto-ethnographies (a research approach that blends autobiography and ethnography, and which invites participants to record their responses, beliefs and emotions to a situation or event, often in the form of personal narratives or self-reflections), Silva has harnessed a wealth of insight that will allow LoGaCulture technology developers to adapt the interactive tools they will design to the very unique experiences of those who visit Madeira.
By gathering data on the unique experiences and needs of a multitude of users, these three promising researchers are helping LoGaCulture get one step closer in fully implementing digital technologies that effectively draw the public back to their cultural and natural heritage.