Embedding Magic: AR in outreach
Lead Research Organisation:
Newcastle University
Department Name: Sch of Arts and Cultures
Abstract
Our project Children's Magical Realism for New Spatial Interactions: AR and Archives (henceforth CMR:AR) had two main aims. The first contribute to design research for new Augmented Reality technologies on mobile phones. We argued that there was a real potential for thinking differently about how the digital space in Augmented Reality (AR) applications could be made more interesting, creative, and have more genuine connections to the real environment in which they are experienced. To do that we looked at magical realist literature for children. David Almond is an author who situates magical realist stories in and around the North East. His archive had recently been acquired by our project partners Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books. We worked with specialists from Seven Stories, with children and young people and with smartphone developers to translate ideas about place and memory from David's books, to interaction design ideas about encountering AR objects in specific places using design prototyping workshops to enable participants to foreground their knowledge. Magical realism is particularly interesting and useful for the development of immersive technologies because of the way that it blends everyday places and events with eerie, magical or fantastical elements. By working in this way we were also modelling a process for other cultural organisations who wish to commission new digital work with immersive technologies. Our aim was to provide such organisations with ideas for better collaboration with designers and developers.
Our new proposal takes the interaction design research ideas developed in our workshops and uses it as an education and outreach tool working with young people in economically disadvantaged areas of Newcastle upon Tyne. Working with our partners we will take the workshop methods we have developed and translate them into a Seven Stories offer which can be taken to schools and community groups in East End wards of the city. Together with our partners we will work with children and young people in creative design activities which will present our ideas about memory place and immersive technology and empower participants to relate them to their own community locales.
Our follow on project will also work to further develop our impact with cultural organisations and digital developers. We will plan and facilitate a short workshop series with local cultural organisations and digital professionals in and around Newcastle to present our collaborative process and to relate it to their digital strategies. By doing so we aim to have impact in the commissioning and development by cultural organisations of new digital work in immersive technology.
Our new proposal takes the interaction design research ideas developed in our workshops and uses it as an education and outreach tool working with young people in economically disadvantaged areas of Newcastle upon Tyne. Working with our partners we will take the workshop methods we have developed and translate them into a Seven Stories offer which can be taken to schools and community groups in East End wards of the city. Together with our partners we will work with children and young people in creative design activities which will present our ideas about memory place and immersive technology and empower participants to relate them to their own community locales.
Our follow on project will also work to further develop our impact with cultural organisations and digital developers. We will plan and facilitate a short workshop series with local cultural organisations and digital professionals in and around Newcastle to present our collaborative process and to relate it to their digital strategies. By doing so we aim to have impact in the commissioning and development by cultural organisations of new digital work in immersive technology.
Planned Impact
Our activities focus on developing our impact for three groups: third sector organisations such as museums, galleries, theatres or other creative venues; children and young people in disadvantaged areas of Newcastle upon Tyne, Byker and Walker; and digital developers. These parties will benefit in the following ways:
Social Impact: New audiences and user communities
Our proposal works with new audiences of children, young people and community workers in two of Newcastle upon Tyne's most disadvantaged wards.
1. Our proposal encourages participants to engage with their community environments in active, creative ways. There is strong evidence that participation in the arts can reduce social exclusion, support civic values in young people and contribute to community cohesion
2. The embedding of our research presents innovative ideas about how increasingly familiar technologies to children and young people can be creatively reclaimed. Children and young people's capacity to contribute to our technological future is built on the knowledge they have access to. By introducing children and young people to methods from interaction design we increase their opportunities for influencing the future of immersive technology through career avenues and through their capacity to engage socially and politically with the development and also the contestation of digital space
3. Our outreach programme will develop relationships between our partners Seven Stories and communities in Byker and Walker. By doing so it will open opportunities for participation in the arts beyond the scope of our proposal
Sector Impact: cultural organisations' strategies and methods
We will work with networks of cultural organisations including Digital Cultures and North Networks to encourage the adoption of our methods within them and to help relate them to their own strategic objectives for developing digital work.
1. Our proposal advocates to the wider cultural sector that innovation mediated through the use of emerging and tested technologies requires a rethink of commonly employed digital development methodologies. In order for this sector to deliver to their widespread social impact imperatives, community co-production (practice generally siloed to learning, participation and exhibitions) will be shared as a necessary stage within digital developments for which we need new intelligence and tools. Our particular methods of design workshopping present a viable way of addressing this need
2. Our workshops with cultural organisations and designers/developers will take the findings from our original project, articulated in a 'designers report' tookit and consider their implications within both the on-going work and the development of digital strategies of participant organisations
Sector Impact: designers and developers
We will build on our relationships with existing digital networks including VRTGO labs, Creative Fuse NE and Proto: Centre for Emerging Technologies to encourage more collaborative models of working for immersive technologies developed in partnership with the cultural sector.
1. Our workshops with designers/developers and cultural organisations will take key recommendations from our original report and relate these to challenges faced in collaborations between organisations seeking to develop immersive experiences which value the cultural knowledge they hold and designers/developers whose creativity can give that knowledge expression
Social Impact: New audiences and user communities
Our proposal works with new audiences of children, young people and community workers in two of Newcastle upon Tyne's most disadvantaged wards.
1. Our proposal encourages participants to engage with their community environments in active, creative ways. There is strong evidence that participation in the arts can reduce social exclusion, support civic values in young people and contribute to community cohesion
2. The embedding of our research presents innovative ideas about how increasingly familiar technologies to children and young people can be creatively reclaimed. Children and young people's capacity to contribute to our technological future is built on the knowledge they have access to. By introducing children and young people to methods from interaction design we increase their opportunities for influencing the future of immersive technology through career avenues and through their capacity to engage socially and politically with the development and also the contestation of digital space
3. Our outreach programme will develop relationships between our partners Seven Stories and communities in Byker and Walker. By doing so it will open opportunities for participation in the arts beyond the scope of our proposal
Sector Impact: cultural organisations' strategies and methods
We will work with networks of cultural organisations including Digital Cultures and North Networks to encourage the adoption of our methods within them and to help relate them to their own strategic objectives for developing digital work.
1. Our proposal advocates to the wider cultural sector that innovation mediated through the use of emerging and tested technologies requires a rethink of commonly employed digital development methodologies. In order for this sector to deliver to their widespread social impact imperatives, community co-production (practice generally siloed to learning, participation and exhibitions) will be shared as a necessary stage within digital developments for which we need new intelligence and tools. Our particular methods of design workshopping present a viable way of addressing this need
2. Our workshops with cultural organisations and designers/developers will take the findings from our original project, articulated in a 'designers report' tookit and consider their implications within both the on-going work and the development of digital strategies of participant organisations
Sector Impact: designers and developers
We will build on our relationships with existing digital networks including VRTGO labs, Creative Fuse NE and Proto: Centre for Emerging Technologies to encourage more collaborative models of working for immersive technologies developed in partnership with the cultural sector.
1. Our workshops with designers/developers and cultural organisations will take key recommendations from our original report and relate these to challenges faced in collaborations between organisations seeking to develop immersive experiences which value the cultural knowledge they hold and designers/developers whose creativity can give that knowledge expression
People |
ORCID iD |
| Tom Schofield (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Arrigoni G
(2019)
Framing collaborative processes of digital transformation in cultural organisations: from literary archives to augmented reality
in Museum Management and Curatorship
Reynolds K
(2019)
Children's Magical Realism for New Spatial Interactions: Augmented Reality and the David Almond Archives
in Children's Literature in Education
Schofield T
(2019)
Magical Realism and Augmented Reality
| Description | This award was for impact and engagement and consequently the findings are broadly the same as for the original project. However we also discovered that the use of our AR app and the surrounding workshop processes was a viable way to engage children in new ways with their environments. |
| Exploitation Route | We have described in our publications how professional designers (as well as design researchers) can use influences of magical realism and other forms of literature to make approach the use of immersive technologies in public space differently. |
| Sectors | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Our research produced social, and cultural impact by changing the attitudes and practices of our partners to digital collaboration, changing the way that children explore and imagine their day to day environments, and changing the way that people experience archives. Most of this impact was local to Newcastle upon Tyne but we have extended this through disseminating our work to other cultural institutions locally (through workshops) and nationally through presentations at professional national conferences (including the National Archives Association conference.) i1. Improving access to archival materials i1a.) We exposed a rich cultural resource, the archive of children's author David Almond, to a larger and more diverse audience through our workshops and project app, Magical Reality. ie8 noted that the inclusion of archival materials as parts of immersive experience afforded accessibility to some children in her care. 'I think it was really important and really good that the archival elements were embedded in the imaginative experience. I think it would have felt very different to the children if they had been taken to look at archival items in any museum or centre []that could have had the effect of making some the children feel a little bit shut out.' Our work brought more 150 children (over half from areas with low socio-economic indicators) into access with the archival materials through our workshops expanding their value from academic research and allowed them to experience them as parts of stories, embedded in physical spaces. i1b.) ie9 noted that the inclusion of the 7S creative associate in the development process supported their capacity to produce future projects working with archives and technology, 'having Elena more closely involved [made it] really interesting to explore how seven stories could use digital more in their workshops, [for] delivery by the creative associates' i2. Producing new forms of audience experience with AR and archives Audiences in Newcastle upon Tyne encountered archival papers in new and innovative ways that presented archival objects in AR. Children we worked with were able to exercise their imaginations as part of new AR experience and were able to see those technologies in a new light, 'with AR it comes to you. I like how something unusual can just come out of nowhere. I like how you can use your imagination and you can go and find things [with the app],' year 7 pupil, i3. Changing children's attitudes through digital creativity and storytelling Our follow-on project for impact and engagement expanded our workshops' contributions in changing children's attitudes to local spaces and places and their capacity to be creative within them. (i3a) Children saw first-hand how technology can be developed differently and participated in this process changing their attitude to what it means to do computer science, 'the cultural capital of being able to do work with augmented reality, but then bringing it in with the storytelling was quite good. From my points of view as a computer science teacher, it was interesting for them to see computer science used in a different sort of way.' (i3b) Our workshop methods allowed children to participate in creative culture and overcome barriers to their participation, 'Some children aren't surrounded by books, especially on this estate with the poverty and the reading age is peaking at 8 at the minute for adults. I just feel that projects like the one you've done with 7S are so important to connect people into that literature. The way you did it as well; you didn't shove a book in front of children and say 'now read this'. You brought it to life with that beautiful - your colleague made those beautiful boxes, and just the way that you and your colleague worked with the young people was absolutely fabulous []you didn't just sit there with the book, you took them out, and you made them proud of their estate and look around their estate. That's a really good thing.' (i3c) Our work allowed children to ideate better and more specifically about local places and spaces and to be proud of them. 'I was really impressed by how specific their ideas were. Whether it was how carefully the workshop were being thought through, or how sympathetically the toolkit and the app had been designed, the quality of their work was very high' Children were able to participate better, ideate better and see their local spaces through an imaginative lens, 'it was almost, instead of allowing them to see space in a completely different way, that it [the workshop] facilitated something quite imaginative that was already there' i4. Expanding the reach and scope of our project partners' activities (i4a) The combination of literature and technology enabled by our project was attractive for community leaders building relationships between 7S and communities in Walker and Byker, laying ground work for future projects. 7S creative producer described 'growing links with Byker and Walker and different work that we can bring to those communities and work with those communities on. So that's a really positive kind of first step in that what we hope will be a much longer term engagement' . 7S have previously found it difficult to access these communities and we provided a unique offer, making introductions and cementing relationships. (i4b) The methods we used emphasised collaboration with 7S staff building their capacity to participate in the envisaging and creation of future technological projects at 7S. 'using Elena's expertise in moulding and shaping what that product is going to be, and how it's going to work, and how people are going to use it, and how it's going to be actually really beneficial to both the end user, which is the public, which is the people that we are creating work for.' Our research argued that our workshops provided a forum for knowledge exchange and 7S said 'I also think that museums, cultural organizations, buy people into do this work and don't get involved themselves. So it was really good to be able to have a place where we could kind of work on all that together.' The project trialled forms of knowledge exchange expanding and strengthening the offer 7S is able to make to schools changing 7S practice, 'There was a kind of benefit there too, in terms of their artistic programme essentially both for the general public and for schools. I think those are kind of two of the most interesting things that came out of it: the kind of spaces that were created for knowledge exchange between those different groups of people'. We continue to seek to broaden the impact of our work supporting 7S to continue producing the workshops and using our project report which describes the collaboration to help other organisations replicate or adapt our process. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2019 |
| Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | Workshops with cultural institutions and AR developers |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | We held 2 workshops which introduced the relevance of creative immersive work from the perspectives of AR developers to museums and cultural organisations, and then from the perspective of museums and cultural organisations to developers. Each was attended by around 30 people. The activity was impactful in a. Generating new networks. Participants reported the usefulness of being introduced to key contacts b. For museums and cultural organisations particularly, participants reported how useful the sessions had been in introducing creative possibilities in immersive technology |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |