Interview with Dr Amy Frost: heritage, communities and technology

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13 minute read
Jo Morrison

Jo Morrison

Director of Digital Innovation & Research

Digital Placemaking

Arts & Culture

Digital Insights

Drone photo of the golden pillars at the very top of Beckford's Tower, looking over the landscape and Bath.

Photo: Caspar Farrell - Beckford’s Tower, Bath Preservation Trust

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.

Photos of Dr Amy Frost and Dr Jo Morrison with job titles

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.

4 images. 1 Photo of two of the community panel. 2 Image from video interview with contractor, conducted by school children. 3 Photo of two more panel members from local communities. 4 Screengrab of five webinar experts during the heritage discussion webinar.
Community involvement included participation on the advisory board, visits and videos of the redevelopment by local school children, collaboration with dance studios and public webinars. Images: Beckford’s Tower – Bath Preservation Trust.

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.

Photo of people in the main museum room with exhibits, information panels, painting and artefacts.
Photo: Zubr

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.

2 photos. 1 hand holding phone, showing AR image of what that part of the building looked like. 2 Digital wall panel, with options to listen to audio and further information on artefacts.
Photos: Zubr

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.

Photo of person looking through VR goggles in the wheelchair-accessible ground-level room.

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.

Screen grabs from app of map, exhibits, quest, trail and photo of the tower with surrounding landscape
The Beckford’s Tower app enables visitors, and remote audiences, to explore the site and stories. Photo: Beckford’s Tower – Bath Preservation Trust.

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 for sharing your insight and experience of this fascinating project!

 

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