Changes

A busy month with various events having happened as well as the work on the Beaulieu project.

I am now studying my PhD (MPhil/PhD in Design) with Winchester College of Art, University of Southampton. The reason for moving from Solent to Southampton is mostly due to the creative design support from my new supervisory team at Winchester, Dr David Birks, Ed d'Souza and Professor Ashok Ranchhod. It will also allow me to submit a practical (the TW application) as well as the thesis. This was not impossible at Solent but also not the norm, with Winchester it is expected from a design student.

The PhD therefore has had a little lapse whilst waiting for the paperwork to go through. I am now desperately trying to get back into it, a little difficult with the break in study and the Beaulieu project, but thanks to the encouragement and focusing guidance from Dr David Birks, I am starting to write again. The more I am reading about ethnography and case study research, the more I can see how the PhD will be invaluable to the development of the Talking Walls application.

I wanted to study at this level primarily to discover how people would want to use this type of application in a heritage environment, how they prefer to learn about their culture, what aspects of their culture were they interested in and how to provide something that would engage and encourage them to learn more. I thought that if I looked at these areas, I would be able to build these results into a template, giving the public something that they wanted to use and were able to use easily, adapting it to their own level and learning preference. This has always been the basis of The Talking Walls.

Technology has become an integral part of this now. When I first embarked on this concept, CD-ROMs were all we had, then DVDs and kiosks. Now we have the web, mobiles, PDAs, interactive TV, intelligent whiteboards as well as DVDs and Kiosks. With this hardware, we also have touch screens, gps, bluetooth, RFID and wireless. Instead of confusing the issue, i.e. which platform do I design for, this technology allows The Talking Walls to expand by becoming multiplatform, offering the user a choice in how they would like to interact with the application. This might be dependent on age, culture, wealth or class.

I like to think that I am a fairly good observer of people, reasonably sensitive / intuitive, and empathise with different people's situations, therefore observing how people use and interact with the application and the environment they are in makes perfect sense to me. Studying people this way might take longer than doing a survey with a heap of questions, but it will hopefully give me a really good insight and help in creating a user friendly, entertaining, educational heritage application. Here's hoping!


A new website, same web address, courtesy of my other half Paul, has just been uploaded. It is now down to me, through Contribute (web editing software) to update the information and provide more images. It will also have a staging area for people to view the application as it develops, so if you are interested email me and I will send the link.