Wander the Workhouse

The “Wander the Workhouse” project aims to produce a novel mobile experience for visitors to Southwell Workhouse, combining location-based technologies with interactive visual markers, to allow visitors to access hidden narratives inside the Workhouse as well as outdoors in the Workhouse grounds and local area.

Working in partnership with the National Trust and Workhouse volunteers, Horizon researchers will develop the experience, integrating Wander Anywhere and Artcodes technologies to show how such combinations can produce compelling, appropriate mobile visitor experiences at heritage sites. As part of ongoing reflection on the way the Workhouse tells its history to the public, this experience will be a core element of trials at the Workhouse of new visitor offerings over the coming year.

As a result of developing the Workhouse experience, a valuable case study for developers will be produced, demonstrating how to develop bespoke applications based on the web-based Wander Anywhere platform. Wander Anywhere is designed to allow non-technical users and developers to easily (and quickly) create location-based experiences for visitors to access using their mobile phones and tablets. The platform has been used in several previous research projects, and the results of these projects have contributed back into an on-going process of refining the platform.

Visit our project blog for more information.