Exploring the digital landscape
Over the last six months I have been working with Tom Steinberg to bring in a new digital service design team into the Fund, to help us create a truly excellent grants and investment experience for our users. It has been a massive learning curve and whilst I understand digital more every day for the whole of my career I have worked in the heritage sector. So for those who similarly are coming from heritage to digital I have given some examples of how the work being done at the Fund now links to more physical landscapes:
Desire lines
On park and landscape projects you can often find tracks made by people creating their own routes, cutting across the paths to walk straight lines into the landscape. These ‘desire lines’ give a great indication of where park users *really* want to go and show an understanding of what it means to inhabit the space, rather than following the prescribed paths set out by the landscape designer. The digital equivalent is using user research to show us how people are really engaging with our services, we may think it is clear how to navigate our website but people create their own digital desire lines by clicking and moving around the site in a way we don’t expect, but should respond to. They are the ones with the real knowledge of what they need, not us.
Community archaeology
In order to truly understand a historical site it can really help to engage local communities in exploring it; their insights and skills can really help to bring a site to life, and they learn skills at the same time, with specialists brought in to lead the digs. In the digital design team we have brought in some great new experts to lead our own explorations, who have brought their own tools, instead of trowels and LIDAR they have brought Slack, Hotjar, a load of post-its and new approaches. Colleagues and users are heavily involved in uncovering the evidence in a collegiate and collaborative way, so they are engaged in the whole process.
Transect walking
To know the landscape you are engaging with you need to get out there and walk it, collecting the evidence of what came before to support new interpretations. In the new digital design team we are speaking to a whole range of people; first time applicants, those who have never applied, existing grantees, our consultants, colleagues and those from the sector. Its ongoing, we don’t just walk the field once and are done, we work with others to make sure we have the evidence before we make any changes to the landscape we all value.
We always record our findings and use the evidence to underpin our proposals, and if the evidence changes, we change our interpretation and response. This is an ongoing project and I look forward to continuing to share what we dig up!
