Heritage Empath - An Embodied Storytelling Experience

Heritage Empath explores the use of locative mobile media to inspire empathy in human social relations. The project is particularly interested in historical empathy - challenging visitors at historical landscapes and sites of heritage to step into the shoes of past generations, facilitating a more subjective engagement with past events and circumstances than would otherwise be possible. Heritage offers a viable framework for testing empathic approaches because it attracts broad public interest, and enthusiastic public audiences on whom to test project outputs. Visitors to historic sites are familiar with questions of perspective, evidence, and intention when being invited to think about historical actors and situations, and with imaginative approaches to historical reconstruction and interpretation. Heritage organisations such as the National Trust and Historic Royal Palaces have shown a good deal of interest in developing more immersive, 'realistic', affective and emotional experiences for their visitors in recent years, and a number of innovative approaches have now been trialled. However, little or no research has been carried out to assess what an empathic visitor engagement might require or the extent to which existing models have been successful. Heritage Empath seeks to do three things therefore: 1) to reach a better understanding of the value of empathy as an applicable and practical tool in problem solving, 2) to research current best practice (both in and beyond the heritage field) and build an application for empathic engagement that works and is designed to be adaptable for use in a variety of fields in human social relations, 3) to test that knowledge by building a case study around past and present experiences of migration in a single British city, Bristol. Heritage Empath collects and curates the personal stories of historical and living migrants to the city and incorporates them into an immersive and interactive experience, freely downloadable to personal mobile devices, and then carefully evaluating its impact upon audiences. Using this framework as a basis, we hope to create a simple to use, adaptable product for marketing to stakeholders in the heritage industry and to ask, can challenges to social relations in the present day be beneficially approached through association with comparative historical experience? Can we better understand contemporary social problems through the perspective and experience of others, by first encountering them in the 'safety zone' of historical imagination? Heritage Empath works with past experience, in place, and then applies it to the present in innovative and subjective form.

Who will benefit?

The project has three primary impact targets: Heritage and museum professionals, communities traditionally regarded as 'hard to reach' by the heritage sector, and practitioners in the experience design sector of the creative economy. It is anticipated however, that impact will extend beyond these sectors to a much wider range of potential beneficiaries. Empathic approaches to conflict resolution and social cohesion, for example, have very broad application and although the project is framed in the first instance as a heritage interpretation tool, it is explicitly intended that outputs will be adaptable for use in wider arenas. Equally, although two specific heritage audiences are addressed, we expect benefits for all audiences that engage with it.

How will they benefit?

Heritage and museum professionals will benefit from the research we conduct into the current and potential use of empathic software in experience design as well as from the material output of the project. We anticipate keen interest from this sector and we expect our work to influence future trends in empathic experience design. Two 'hard to reach' communities are envisaged as beneficiaries: young people and Black & minority ethnic (BME) communities. The project will be developed iteratively through a series of workshops in every stage of production, and work with both these groups will be emphasised. BME participants will be closely involved in the collection of oral histories of migration and we will appoint an RA with particular expertise in and familiarity with this field of research. BME participants are expected to benefit therefore, not only by making their stories and experience heard, but as co-curators of project outputs and, more broadly, as potential audiences at the project's conclusion. Similarly, we will work with youth groups through two successful organisations, the Cultural Youth Forum and My Future My Choice, the educational arm of the Bristol Charitable Initiative Trust. It has an excellent reputation for aspirational work with groups of young people from Bristol's more geographically peripheral schools, and the Principal Investigator has collaborated with them on historically-informed themes for a number of years. Importantly, the project will also create impact for Splash & Ripple and the wider experience design sector of the creative economy. By working collaboratively with university academics on the core design dimensions of the Empath experience, and with support from the Advisory Board, Splash & Ripple will be able to bring a powerful new audio augmented reality offer to the marketplace. With this, they will help clients from a range of backgrounds tell their stories in a new and powerful way. As a small creative company, Splash & Ripple regularly work in response to client briefs but rarely have the opportunity to develop their own projects. In these circumstances, it is often difficult to nurture pure research or creative and theoretical development. But Heritage Empath will create a step change for deepening the company's creative output through allowing them space to focus primarily on development of design aspects of the concept, as well as prototype software bases.