Place

Rebecca Lockwood Norris is the Senior Development Officer in Wiltshire Council’s Economy and Regeneration Service, where she is the lead officer for the Wiltshire Towns Programme.

With a Higher National Diploma in Civil Engineering from UWE, and APM’s Project Management Qualification, Rebecca has over two decades of experience working in the public and voluntary sectors, leading projects to better support and empower communities.

As part of the Programme, Calvium has been working with Rebecca to develop Wiltshire Council’s digital placemaking offering through the creation of the Explore Wiltshire app and Events Wiltshire website.

In this interview, Rebecca shares how Wiltshire has used digital technologies to meet some of its place-based goals, and why accessibility has been key to meeting the diverse needs of the community and creating more vibrant places.

What are the primary goals of the council’s current regeneration and economic strategy, and how do Explore Wiltshire and Events Wiltshire align with the strategy?

The purpose of our economic strategy is to improve the economic resilience of local high streets, which is one of the core threads of our business plan to create and support vibrant town centres. This is through attracting investment, supporting local businesses and town councils and encouraging local spend.

The two products that we have will support the delivery of economic wellbeing across Wiltshire. It is a holistic package of support for town centres, and that includes supporting the visitor economy and cultural offer, which I like to say is the fun to be had in Wiltshire.

How are you using place-based digital technologies to enhance the visitor experience while supporting local businesses and the wider community?

We need communication tools to make sure that people know about what’s happening in Wiltshire – arts, culture, local businesses – which is a major contributing factor to local economic resilience and regeneration.

The Place Experience Platform (PEP), which the trails app and the events website are built on, does what it says on the tin – it’s place and it’s experience – so when we saw that we needed to communicate the stories of the assets that we have in our towns, we initially commissioned the Explore Wiltshire heritage trails app to help people to find and navigate the heritage in our market towns.

We also wanted to ensure that visitors (residents, locals and tourists) have somewhere to find out about things to do. The two went hand in hand because the trails app was developed with an events function, so it was about taking that really strong connection with place through the trails and teasing out the events that happen in those locations too.

We created the progressive web app using the back-end of the trails app, which allows organisations hosting events and activities in Wiltshire to list and promote them in one convenient place. Because it’s also powered by PEP, it’s an accessible and secure format, just like the trails app.

In what ways does Explore Wiltshire contribute to fostering a sense of identity and pride within the town(s) it serves?

The app is helping visitors to discover the people and events, past and present, associated with the built environment and the communities that shape the history and the landscapes of Wiltshire.

There’s curated content, which is put together with each respective town council and sometimes with other community groups – heritage groups, for example – so it encompasses their viewpoint and identity at that local level. I think the more local you get, the more pride there is in a place because people like to celebrate what’s great about where they are.

How do Explore Wiltshire and Events Wiltshire support the council’s objectives for driving footfall, boosting local commerce, and encouraging repeat visits?

Looking at the benefits that the heritage and arts and culture offers our local economy, we saw there was a gap in how we communicate these and that led on to defining the projects to respond to those gaps.

Through communicating the place experience in Wiltshire, we’re supporting town centres to be more vibrant, encouraging visitors into towns and getting them to come in more often and stay for longer. As a result, footfall is boosted and we anticipate people will spend a little bit more money if they’re there for longer or more often. That will give us more resilient town centres.

A secondary effect (because it’s beyond economy and region but still falls within the remit of Wiltshire Council) is the improved wellbeing of residents. If they’re getting out into our towns more often and for longer, they’re going to have increased physical activity and social interactions.

What role does digital innovation, exemplified by Explore Wiltshire and Events Wiltshire, play in making the town(s) more competitive in attracting tourists, residents, and investment?

The products, as marketing tools, allow discovery of the curated information in a convenient, accessible way, and that’s there for everybody to access because it’s digital – whether local residents or people from outside the area. It allows us to communicate what our market towns have to offer, so we’re showcasing our county to both tourists and investors, and also letting residents know about what’s available to them locally.

How has Wiltshire Council worked with local stakeholders, such as businesses, cultural institutions, and residents, to ensure Explore Wiltshire and Events Wiltshire reflect the unique character and needs of the community?

Returning to the importance of local identity and pride, we have developed the events platform with a user group that’s made up of town council and event venue staff.  These stakeholders in particular took part in testing for the first iteration of the progressive web app, the events site, and their feedback was taken into consideration as final iterations were developed.

Another element was something done internally at Wiltshire Council prior to the user testing; we engaged with our carers and disability staff network so that we can ensure the venue accessibility tags for event listings are comprehensive and inclusive. Alongside assigning categories to events such as ‘food and drink’ or ‘arts and culture’, we have added tags so people can clearly see if there’s disabled parking, a working hearing loop or quiet space, for example.

What metrics or indicators will you use to measure the success of Explore Wiltshire and Events Wiltshire in contributing to the town’s economic growth and regeneration efforts?

Our primary measure of the response to the various projects in the Wiltshire Towns programme is footfall, which includes the volume of footfall and dwell time. We can also look at the specific town centre events – annual festivals, monthly markets, seasonal events – and see whether they’ve had a positive impact on footfall and dwell time. This involves monitoring where visitors have come from, which allows us to see how it’s altering behaviour and vacancy rates.

The connection with the experience and the PEP/digital products is that if we’ve got more people in our town centres, and the vibrancy is greater and there’s more happening, then that’s going to support the existing businesses. It should also bring new businesses and new investment into the town centres.

How has using digital technology supported accessibility, and enabled more people to access and enjoy activities in the county?

Accessibility has been woven into every aspect of the project. The design of the product through the PEP incorporates accessibility in terms of user ability and also venue accessibility. Then, applying our comprehensive accessibility guidelines in the development of the product, we’ve enabled all visitors and locals to have access to more information about place-based activity in the county.

Were there any surprises along the way?

Working on Explore Wiltshire Events was my first time working on a digital product development project, and so leading that I learned lots of new terminology and about new processes and features that are included in digital tools. These are things you just take for granted when you’re using it, but understanding what goes into that has been quite a learning curve for me. I’ve been supported by a project team of subject matter experts, both from other Wiltshire Council service areas and from Calvium, which is absolutely essential.

One surprise was the timescales needed to set up the domain and the work behind that for the web app. So I had no knowledge of what this was, and it was just a discovery towards the end of the development phase. Every time I speak to Calvium I learn something new on the technical side.

What has worked particularly well, what have been the successes? Do you have any advice for others in a similar position?

Really good collaboration and being open and honest about any limited knowledge is key. Having regular meetings between project stakeholders, even if they’re only a five to 10-minute catch up, have been really helpful in this project. Those conversations help to identify any gaps in the technical or process knowledge, and can challenge the assumptions that limit those surprises.

If we hadn’t been having the meetings, I would have discovered a lot later on that an extra couple of weeks was needed for the domain work, and it could have been a difficult situation if the launch was ready to go but publishing happened at a later date than planned. I was very honest with everybody about not knowing all the technicalities, so even if you think I might know it, just say it because you won’t know until you say.

Thank you Rebecca for sharing your experience and insight with us!

Dr Amy Frost is the senior curator at Bath Preservation Trust, based at the Museum of Bath Architecture. An expert in 18th and 19th century British architecture, Amy is currently overseeing a £4m project at Beckford’s Tower, aiming to reimagine the landscape it exists within and ultimately remove the building from the heritage at-risk list. As part of this, Calvium and AR partners Zubr were commissioned to develop a mobile app and immersive digital placemaking experience for visitors.

In this interview, Amy – who also lectures at the University of Bath’s School of Architecture – shares her views on how community co-creation and digital technologies are supporting inclusive access to heritage sites.

How did co-creation and consultation play a part in this project?

Given the project was going to be both a conservation project, and also finding a way to tell complex and problematic stories about Beckford, whose wealth came from the transatlantic slave trade, we started consultation early – even before we’d been given the National Lottery Heritage Fund funding, we did a public consultation to inform what we were planning.

The early stages of the project coincided with the pandemic at the start of 2020. As well as shifting our in-person sessions with community groups online, we put up gazebos on the site so people could participate in a socially distanced way. This created not only our interpretation strategy, but our community advisory panel who could be our ‘critical friends’. They advised on everything, from wording for interpretation in the museum to what floor colour to use to whether we have an EV charging point in the car park.

For the digital element, we did a lot of testing around what was being developed in terms of content, the app and augmented reality moments. The community shaped that development and what was eventually installed at the museum and online.

Do you still have relationships with communities today?

A lot of the partnerships we have made are ongoing, and that is the fundamental key to public and community engagement. The advisory panel has now segued into being the advisory board for the museum, which is really important because it should shift away from a slightly more traditional museum advisory board – where there are a lot of academics and experts – to a variety of people that are community-focused.

We see lots of people coming back too. For example, we had a big accessibility focus group with access users, who have come back and tested what we’ve done, given feedback and suggested new ideas.

It takes a long time to build and sustain those relationships but they’re so vital.

Why did you choose to include a digital component as part of the visitor experience?

Digital is essential to museum experiences now. Particularly when thinking about younger audiences, there is an expectation from visitors that there is a digital component.

We talk quite a lot about the digital visitor; digital enables us to have visitors who might not physically ever come to the museum, and that gives you a whole other audience. But we are always very firm from the beginning that digital in the museum enhances the experience, it doesn’t replace the collection and the physical interpretation. It’s not the fundamental layer but adds another layer of information, enjoyment or participation.

Crucially, as a small building on the outskirts of Bath, we’re susceptible to storms and WiFi going down, so we can’t over-rely on digital. We need to make sure visitors can come in and get the whole experience, so our whole project was built around the idea of future-proofing infrastructure. In that sense, everything was designed to be removable; for example, if an iPad isn’t working we will remove it rather than label it as broken so people won’t know it’s missing.

Can you describe how digital tech is helping to represent the complex and difficult histories of Beckfords’s Tower?

We have a layered approach to storytelling; what’s the first fundamental layer of information you want every visitor to have, and then how do you build on that? We have layered digital to allow people to have the choice to find out more about the story of William Beckford and the wealth he and his family gained through the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people.

While we have limited space to tell what is a very complex story on-site, digital allows us to go into those stories in more depth than a 150-word interpretation panel can give. The website, app and other digital elements, such as films introduced into museums, all give people the option to dig deeper. This is important because it creates safer spaces for people, so there’s certain language we don’t use on the physical panel but that we do use on digital and in the guidebook.

Digital also allows us to change things and add layers more quickly, which is really important when you’re dealing with difficult stories. The app content was informed by our consultations and community advisory panel, which resulted in age advisory warnings for some elements and layers developed for children and family audiences.

You said at the Out of the Archives online event that you chose for interpretation to be flexible and continually changing. Can you expand on this?

Beckford’s Tower is a two-room museum, one of Bath Preservation Trust’s four museums. We have an incredibly small team and work on limited resources, so at the Tower we had to invest in infrastructure that could be flexible and changeable. For example, the design of the space and display cases has to be changeable by one person. Even the labels aren’t stuck to the wall; that’s partly to make it sustainable but also because no interpretation should be permanent.

Ideas are changing and new research is coming in all the time, particularly when dealing with complex subjects and when you want to take on board feedback and responses. Our mantra was: we need to be able to change a label in an hour and an interpretation panel overnight.

Digital really fed into that and finding an app where the content management system was easy to use (by non-technology experts) was really important. The Place Experience Platform allows us to change content and add more key features – augmented reality, photogrammetry, trails, films – and test them as we go.

How has the use of digital technologies supported the aims of Beckford’s Tower?

We have massive stories to tell and it’s so hard to do it in two rooms. When there are so many different people and voices that can tell them, we need to be able to do that in lots of different ways. Digital is a fundamental option and also gives us a way of holding those testimonies. For instance, we’ve been doing a lot of interviews and recording people, which need to be turned into a 60-second clip on an app. But in the process of creating that content for digital, we’ve got a two-hour interview with someone like the historian Robert Beckford and that becomes something we’ve got in the archive for future use.

It’s not just about the product of the digital, it’s about what you collect in the production of it as well.

How has the Place Experience Platform supported  / helped to achieve the aims of the work of Bath Preservation Trust?

The big change in our project was the acquisition of the original garden landscape for the tower, including the grotto tunnel Beckford had built. Between the Tower and the grotto the landscape is now a public cemetery, which we don’t own, so we knew whatever interpretation we were going to do couldn’t necessarily be lots of physical intervention in a space still used for mourning and commemoration.

So rather than including lots of posts, pillars and signs, digital became the way of offering interpretation to that space. The Place Experience Platform has allowed us to not only offer fundamental information via a free downloadable guide, but also lots of different ways of telling stories. We include interviews with people who have a connection to the tower and landscape, varying from the archaeologist that did the final excavation of the grotto explaining what they discovered, to a resident who grew up looking at the tower, discussing how the view of a building created by the profits of slavery made them feel about their home as a young black person in Bath.

How has the digital layer and functionality of the digital visitor experience increased accessibility?

We always knew digital was going to be absolutely fundamental to access when you have a 120-foot high tower. When we did early access focus groups, we looked at barriers to access – including visual, hearing and physical – and decided a digital 360-degree panoramic tour of the building would be a big part of our digital package. It’s available through our only level access space, which is a free-to-enter vault in the tower that can be entered from the landscape.

There, we have tactile models with Braille interpretation, large print guides, and binoculars for the 360 tool – they are untethered to allow wheelchair users to move 360 with them.

What are some of the plans that you have to expand the experience?

One stumbling block we have encountered is how to get people to download an app out in the middle of a landscape where there is no phone reception and intermittent free WiFi. So we need to either find a way to encourage people to download it before they come, for example making it clearer on the website, or we need to put more physical interpretation in the space because people are missing so much amazing content on the app.

That evaluation process has been really interesting because it has given us a way to test what people do and don’t use in a landscape environment. We’re now looking at how we can use the Place Experience Platform to enhance the experience, such as making a tour that’s purely focused on the cemetery and the people that are buried there.

How is the partnership with PhD students supporting ongoing content creation? What are the next steps?

We are working with two students who are researching to identify and explore the legacy of enslaved people held in ownership by the Beckford family. It’s still in the early days, so we’re currently looking at what points can some of the things they’re researching be added to the museum, for example physical displays, news and blog items on the website, a film they record or workshops they run.

It depends on what they find and how they process it. Testing theses and research is so important when talking about applied history. You can have all the academic knowledge and research, but it’s vital to communicate it with a wider public rather than just an academic audience.

We don’t know what the next steps are yet because we don’t know what they’re going to find and what will become part of the museum. And that’s exciting.

What have been the key points you’ve learned through delivering the digital project?

Given the difficult stories we’ve got to tell, finding the right partner was critical; whoever we worked with had to be completely on board with how upfront and transparent we wanted to be with how we tell them. We interviewed a lot of people during the tender to ensure we had the right people on board, which led us to Calvium and Zubr.

Fundamentally, Calvium is passionate about getting stories out there and is very embedded in opening up that access – something that isn’t necessarily always the case if you’re hiring a tech firm, for instance. The heritage sector has such passion, you need to be working with people that share it.

Local is also really important to us, so working with companies down the road in Bristol rather than from further afield was important for our sustainability goals and reducing our carbon footprint.

Digital enables working with people who are not local, and that can be great, but nothing is better than when the development team are able to easily pop over to the museum and check things or remind themselves how the museum works. That approach to working with people locally as much as possible for our digital provision will certainly be something that we look to embed in all our future projects, not just at Beckford’s Tower, but at our other museums as well.

What would you say to other venue / place managers considering PEP as a digital place-based tool?

I would recommend it. What helps is there is a structure, so you’re just providing content to populate it. Calvium is continually developing it from feedback so I think the more people that sign up for it and the more bespoke elements that are needed, the more the platform will flex and grow.

For a small organisation like ours, you don’t want something that’s been purpose made for you because that’s not sustainable in the long term – we’ve had that in the past where we couldn’t afford a service level agreement to keep it going – whereas something being used by lots of people is going to last longer. We need to future-proof what we use.

Is there anything you’d like to say about working with Calvium?

It’s been really easy and respectful, and that’s when good partnerships really work. When it hits points where we don’t understand something, Calvium communicate in a very easy-to-understand, supportive way. It feels very much like if there’s a problem or something goes wrong, even if it’s not in a service agreement, Calvium is there to give you a hand.

For a small organisation like us, where we don’t have the skills in-house or a dedicated digital officer, it’s so important knowing you can just drop an email or pick up the phone and ask for help.

Thank you Dr Frost for sharing your insight and experience of this fascinating project!

We’re passionate exponents of accessibility and that’s true of every aspect of the Place Experience Platform, from meeting and exceeding digital accessibility standards, through to making it easier for people to visit places and spaces. In line with this, we’ve recently developed new functionality to make it much simpler for end users of the Place Experience Platform to find the accessible facilities and amenities they need, when planning and undertaking a visit. 

It’s now possible to search, filter and display all of the accessible amenities provided in an area, the results of which are clearly displayed on a map alongside other useful and relevant information. Even better, when the user is physically in the place, the location aware nature of the content helps with establishing proximity to an amenity and wayfinding.

The new feature has shipped to the Wiltshire events site and the accompanying Explore Wiltshire App. Both are powered by a single Content Management System making it simple and quick to publish across multiple platforms at once. 

Want to learn more about the enhanced accessibility of the Place Experience Platform? Book a demo here and we’ll give you a walkthrough. 

How can digital technologies provide new forms of accessibility and interpretation, helping to tell seldom heard stories and histories? 

In this one hour session, guest experts from three different disciplines met to share their experiences and discuss the possibilities: 

• Dr Amy Frost, Senior Curator at the Bath Preservation Trust
• Amy Stewart, Producer at Zubr Curio
• Kathryn Davis, Managing Director at Visit West. 

Thanks to all who could join us for this lunchtime exploration of heritage, visitor engagement and digital technologies.

This event was part of the Out of the Archives series, which explores the question of how organisations can use their heritage and cultural assets to create rich and engaging digital experiences for visitors and local communities.

 

Speaker biographies

 

Dr. Amy Frost
Bath Preservation Trust  & Museum of Bath Architecture,
Senior Curator / Architectural Curator and Collections Manager
Dr. Amy Frost is the Architectural Curator of the Bath Preservation Trust based at the Museum of Bath Architecture and specialises in British architecture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Alongside her work on the built heritage of Bath she is also an expert on the life and aesthetics of the British collector and writer William Beckford (1760-1844) and is the Curator of Beckford’s Tower & Museum in Bath.  She is a part-time Teaching Fellow at the University of Bath, School of Architecture.

Kathryn Davis
Managing Director, Visit West
Kathryn Davis was appointed Managing Director of Visit West in 2023, following 23 years working in Destination Management and Marketing in Bristol, Bath and the south west of England. Visit West deliver three Bristol Business Improvement Districts and are a nationally accredited Local Visitor Economy Partnership (LVEP).  She represents the destinations at national and international forums and promotes the value and importance of the visitor economy in the region. Kathryn is Vice-President of the Tourism Management Institute, a Board Member of UK Inbound and Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, and a member of the Tourism Industry Council.

Amy Stewart
Producer, Zubr Curio
Amy Stewart is a Producer at Zubr Curio, a specialist augmented and virtual reality studio catering specifically to the arts, heritage and culture sector by developing high-quality, accessible, audience-centred immersive content and educational experiences.

 

Additional resources

 

Dr. Amy Frost

Beckford’s Tower community advisory panel 

Beckford’s Tower

Calvium summary of Beckford’s Tower digital project

Amy Stewart

US Civil War AR experience: St James Church

Acropolis AR app

AR for Carrickfergus Castle

Window to the Past: Bristol Old Vic 250th birthday

Kathryn Davis

Visit West destination management plan, including focus on ‘Heritage Reinterpreted’

Wake the Tiger, experience in Bristol

Local Visitor Economy Partnership programme (LVEP), information from Visit England

Calvium

Enhancing place engagement with augmented reality

‘Creative app maps the way through Redcliffe’s art scene’, Bristol 24/7

The story of the Creative Journeys project, Art Acumen website 

Place Experience Platform

Free resources on digital placemaking

Out of the Archives: Episodes 1 and 2 

The Rochester Sweeps festival is a highlight of Medway’s county calendar, where Morris troupes gather from around the country to celebrate May Day traditions, enjoy the present and strengthen connections for the future.

In May 2024, the festival was supported by the Visit Medway app, which provided a comprehensive digital guide to the festival, including information on performers, venues and timings to support visitors and festival-goers to make the most of the event and time in the area.

The festival guide was available over the bank holiday weekend of the event, as a special section of the app. 

Being able to easily add event guides to an existing app saves time and resources for the Visit Medway team. Annual event information can be saved, ready to be revised next year. For visitors, the app provides one port of call for specialist events, the region’s permanent attractions as well as other events through the year, increasing awareness of a wider range of activities in the area, and encouraging repeat visits.