Bring your own device digital storytelling in museums

Dr Craig Jordan-Baker is an external consultant on the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust (RPMT)/Heritage Lottery Digital Volunteering grant project for ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) storytelling in the museum. 
RPMT’s digital review has identified ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) storytelling as a key tactic for increasing engagement in museums, but it recognises a need to bring a wider array of voices into museum interpretation. This project will build upon previous international research collaborations to develop and test tools and methods for training and equipping volunteers to carry out this work.

The project will train new volunteers (10-15) to produce new ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) content for two museums: Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and Preston Manor. BYOD interpretation is a key element of the digital plan and cannot be successfully achieved by only using content created by museum staff. A diverse group of volunteers will bring a more polyvocal approach that can augment and even challenge traditional curator led narratives.

Volunteers will be tasked with working towards two interpretative outputs, both of which visitors can access using their mobile phones or tablets that we will loan. The first will be a brand-new audio guide for Preston Manor, an historic house presented as an Edwardian home. This will be modelled on the successful Royal Pavilion audio tour, which was delivered in-house through a website optimised for mobile devices (new.paviliontour.uk). 
The volunteers will work closely with a narrative designer Dr Craig Jordan-Baker to create a linear tour that conveys the history of the house along with focal points in each room and deep dives into the stories of the family who owned it and the servants who worked for them.

The second output will be a ‘star objects’ scavenger hunt through Brighton Museum, an eclectic civic museum on the Royal Pavilion estate. This enables visitors to seek out highlights from the displayed collection and reveal a bite-sized story about each exhibit by simply photographing the object. 
These two platforms will allow RPMT to explore how they can equip volunteers to create stories for different types of visitor experience: linear and directed in the case of the Preston Manor guide; non-linear and self-directed in the case of Brighton Museum. 
This will inform a set of ideation and design tools for in-gallery digital storytelling designed with Dr Craig Jordan-Baker. These will be used to guide our future practice and the possible extension of this digital volunteering programme after the funding period and will also be made available to the wider heritage sector.