 |
| Chawton House, Hampshire, UK |
In Brief
Chawton House (Hampshire, UK) is a historic English country house associated with Jane Austen, the well-known 18th century English writer. Its core function is hosting a library of early English women's writing. In recent years it has attracted increasing numbers of visitors with more general interests in English manor houses and gardens.
The Chawton House Project uses ubiquitous computing to create novel technology-enhanced experiences of the estate for visitors. Working with the curators of Chawton House we co-designed a system consisting of portable devices linked to a location-sensing architecture consisting of GPS augmented by pingers (RF beacons), set up in the gardens. Based on an information architecture called adaptive physical hypertext, the system is flexible, reconfigurable and extensible, capable of delivering a wide range of different kinds of experience for visitors ranging from literary societies to schoolchildren. The main demonstrator for the system thus far has been a 'literacy fieldtrip' for Year 5 primary school students in July 2005.
 |
| The Literacy Fieldtrip: Getting Ready |
The project addresses a range of key issues for user-centred design of ubiquitous computing systems including:
1. How to build meaningful co-design relationships with users where the technology, and what it can do, is intrinsically novel and unfamiliar;
2. How, in partnership with users, to scope, define and work productively within the space of opportunities the technology offers;
3. How to both understand and extend current practice in ways that are meaningful and valuable to users;
4. How to leave our users with technology that they feel they own and can work with into the future.
New Visitor Experiences
 |
| The Literacy Fieldtrip: Exploration Phase |
We carried out ethnographically-informed observational studies of tours - currently given by the curators, who also have other jobs. These revealed that tour-giving is a skilled improvisation where the curators engage and enthuse people according to their responses and interests. Although there is a base of core material that the curators are always keen to communicate, no two tours are exactly alike. Inspired by this, we started to think about how a ubiquitous computing system could deliver experiences to visitors in flexible and responsive ways based on the existing human activity but extending and enhancing it.
A 'Persistent Infrastructure'
We found that curators draw on a core repertoire of material - facts, anecdotes, and so on - and add, omit or rework things for different audiences. Reflecting this, we wanted to create a 'persistent infrastructure'. This phrase means several things. First, a system that stays physically in place all the time, available to give tours (just like the curators); Second, a core system which provides a generic user experience, consisting of PDAs and a core database of information. This is used ('persists') for any tour, but the infrastructure can be extended to provide different, more specialised experiences for specific user groups. The extensions can be of two kinds (often in parallel): (1) technology extensions, where other devices can be added; and (2) 'content' extensions where new information can be added to the system and presented through it. The system is also intended to be 'persistent' in a third sense: of lasting value. We wanted to create a system which persists because it is useful and meaningful to its owners, the curators of Chawton House.
Multiple Stakeholders: 'Users' and Visitors
One of the challenges of the Chawton House Project has been how to work with users to implement this kind of system. To create something meaningful and valuable to Chawton House and to visitors, required understanding what they already do and what they would like to see happen. We did much work on understanding current practice, looking at appropriate ways to extend it, and working with curators to deepen their understanding of the technology to inform design.
Working with users to do co-design involved asking, 'who do we mean by 'users' and which ones should we work with?'. Creating a system for schoolchildren, for example, involved four sets of stakeholders: ourselves, the curators of Chawton House, the teachers form Whiteley School, and the schoolchildren themselves - the 'visitors'. The model for working with this set of stakeholders was for us as researchers to develop a base system with Chawton House - its curators being our 'primary users' - that they could offer to other groups for use and extension. Thus, Whiteley school were 'secondary users' who could see the resources Chawton had to offer (PDAs, location-sensing, a range of audio clips describing and telling stories about locations) and add their own material (in this case, questions and prompts). The concept, then, is of a hierarchy of users, where we support the primary user and the primary user supports secondary users. We also aim, in future, to use visitor feedback as a design resource.
 |
| Exploration Phase: Thinking about a question |
The System
The system consists of PDAs capable of delivering and recording audio and text. The audio it delivers is a large set of clips from recordings of actual audio tours so that what is heard are the voices of real curators. Clips are tagged not only for location but also for topic. They are triggered by location-sensing technology, but also make use of an information architecture called 'physical adaptive hypertext' which is sensitive to where visitors have gone before.
The system is thus intended to provide individual experiences for visitors that are responsive like the human equivalent. However, unlike current tours, the technology allows people to go wherever they want. This leads to different linkings of information and insights about the estate.
The Literacy Fieldtrip
The fieldtrip was designed to support children's literacy skills by providing input to a creative writing exercise. It was in three parts. After arrival, one of the curators took the children on a tour of the interior of the house - not digitally augmented in any way. Next, the six children moved outside the house, and explored the grounds in pairs, free to go where they wished, given prompts by the system. The purpose of this second part of the fieldtrip was to familiarize children with the grounds, finding out facts and stories the curators had told about it, and to inspire their imagination and creativity. After this second part the three groups reconvened with the two teachers and the third part of the fieldtrip was set up. In this final part, each pair of children went to two locations for further investigation, to conceptualize their stories further. The following day, they wrote up their stories back at school.
The fieldtrip received much positive feedback from the curators, the children, and their teachers. In particular, Chawton House felt there was much scope for technology-enhanced educational experiences for other visitor groups, and teachers felt that the grounding of creative writing in exploration of real settings was 'a new kind of teaching strategy' for promoting literacy skills.
 |
| Writing Up |
What's Next?
There are two tranches of work now intended for Chawton House, to do with (a) extending the implementation and demonstration of the system; and (b) conceptualizing co-design around UbiComp systems.
In terms of implementation, the next stage of the Chawton House project is to enable creation of tours for different groups by allowing curators, as well as representatives of those groups, to use the system to author tours. For example. . There are two main reasons for this: (1) it shortcuts the time people need to spend on creating tours; and (2) it helps promote understanding of the system and thinking in terms of what it can do, which helps make it meaningful.
In terms of conceptualizing co-design around UbiComp, the next stage of the project will look at how to model relationships between different stakeholders, particularly primary and secondary users (i.e. respectively, Chawton House and the different visitor groups it attracts). The long-term goal here is for Chawton House to be able to take ownership of the system and understand it at a sufficient level to offer resources to visitor groups that they can effectively use to create new kinds of experience, relatively independent of us as researchers. This involves a deepening of understanding and engagement on the part of Chawton House. Promoting this is one of the key aims of the user-centred design approach we have taken.
Publications :
Weal, M., Cruickshank, D., Michaelides, D., Millard, D., De Roure, D., Hornecker, E., Halloran, J. and Fitzpatrick, G.(2006) A reusable, extensible infrastructure for augmented field trips. In Proceedings of 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Pervasive ELearning. Pisa, Italy, 201-205.
.pdf to come
Hornecker, E., Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M., Millard, D., Michaelides, D., Cruickshank, D. and De Roure, D. (2006) Ubicomp in opportunity spaces: challenges for participatory design. Full paper to appear in Proc. PDC 2006.
.pdf to come
Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M., Millard, D., Michaelides, D., Cruickshank, D. and De Roure, D. (2006) Unfolding understandings: co-designing ubicomp in situ, over time. Full paper to appear in Proc. DIS 2006.
.pdf to come
Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M., Millard, D., Michaelides, D., Cruickshank, D. and De Roure, D. (2006) The literacy fieldtrip: using ubicomp to support children's creative writing. Full paper to appear in Proc. IDC 2006.
.pdf to come
Weal, M., Cruickshank, D., Michaelides, D., Millard, D., De Roure, D., Hornecker, E., Halloran, J. and Fitzpatrick, G. (2006) A persistent infrastructure for augmented field trips. In Proceedings of Ed-Media 06, Orlando, Florida (in press).
.pdf to come
Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Millard, D. and Weal, M. (2005). The Chawton House experience: augmenting the grounds of a historic manor house. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: Towards A New Understanding Of Visitors' Experiences In Museums. Limerick, Ireland, June 29th-30th, 54-65.
.pdf to come
Hornecker, E., Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Harris, E., Millard, D. and Weal, M. (2005). Co-designing novel user experiences at a historic manor house (Cognitive Science Research Paper 579): University of Sussex.
.pdf to come
People
Geraldine Fitzpatrick (PI); Eva Hornecker; John Halloran; Mark Stringer; Eric Harris
Partners
Sussex University : (Interact Lab, COGS)
Southampton University David De Roure (PI); Mark Weal; David Millard; Danius Michaelides; Don Cruikshank
