Francesca Dolcetti, Rachel Opitz, and myself are very excited to announce that we will be hosting a workshop in York in April on digital experience co-design for archaeologists and heritage practitioners. Generously sponsored by the EU Cost Action ARKWORK, and linked to our forthcoming roundtable on User Experience at the CAA conference in Poland, this two-day event will entail small groups working together through a four-phase model (case study description, experience design, prototyping, & evaluation), towards the creation and critique of mock-up digital archaeology/heritage experiences.
We are seeking a small group of interested participants to join us for this expenses-paid workshop on 1-2 April. To be eligible, you must be a member of ARKWORK, and you can apply to join via ARKWORK’s ‘join us’ page. We are particularly keen to support participants from Inclusiveness Target Countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Republic of Serbia and Turkey.
Please read below for a fuller description of the intent of the workshop, its schedule, and how to apply. The deadline for expressions of interest is 16 December. We hope to host you in York!
Co-Design of Digital Experiences in Archaeology, 1-2 April, 2019
King’s Manor, University of York, York, UK
User experience (UX) is a critical component of effectively mobilizing legacy datasets and collections in archaeology. In this sense, it is crucial to the success of the discipline as a scholarly, professional and pedagogical pursuit. However, our understandings of UX in archaeology, and our tools to facilitate UX design and evaluation, are arguably negligible. This workshop is focused on the interdisciplinary co-creation and user testing of digitally-mediated experiences geared at archaeological sites and collections. It aims to provide a forum for testing the benefits of design strategies and tools coming from the field of Participatory Design, and devising a digital publication work pipeline that involves end users and stakeholders from the outset. We seek to bring together a multidisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners working in the field of archaeological knowledge production, use and communication.
The activities proposed here will provide practical experiences on how to integrate archaeological data, storytelling and digital platforms to encourage professional and wider public engagement with the past. Moreover, the workshop aims to foster reflections on the importance of evaluation and iterative design, especially within the prototyping phase, to create experiences bespoke to diverse users’ needs and expectations.
The workshop is organised as a two-day event with participants working in 4 groups, structured in four phases:
- case study description: each group will work on a preselected case study and articulate its basic information and available sources (metadata/paradata);
- experience design: each group will define both contents and intended audience, what kind of message they intend to convey and how to structure the experience;
- prototyping: each group will build a 2D/3D paper mock-up to visualise the experience and make it tangible;
- evaluation: each group will act as end users and cross-evaluate other groups’ experiences.
1 April
9.30-10.00 introductions
10.00-10.30 coffee break
10.30-11.00 introduction to the aim and structure of workshop activities
11.00-12.30 activity 1: case study description
12.30-13.30 lunch break
13.30-15.30 activity 2: experience design
15.30-16.00 coffee break
16.00-17.00 discussion
19.00 Social dinner
2 April
9.30-10.00 resume activities
10.00-10.30 coffee break
10.30-12.30 activity 3: prototyping
12.30-13.30 lunch break
13.30-16.00 activity 4: evaluation
16.00-16.30 coffee and final discussion
Call for participants
We are looking for 16 participants who
- are working on projects focused on the creation of digital resources related to archaeological collections and heritage sites;
- have research interests in UX design, UX evaluation and participatory design fields.
- Are a member of COST Action ARKWORK. If you are interested in joining the action please contact the workshop organisers, and submit an expression of interest at https://www.arkwork.eu/join-us/
If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please send a short expression of interest (no more than 150 words) to Francesca Dolcetti (fd648@york.ac.uk).
Deadline for expressions of interest is Sunday 16 December 2018.
Participation to this event is open to Arkwork members only. If you are interested in joining the Action please contact the workshop organisers, and submit an expression of interest at https://www.arkwork.eu/join-us/
SARA PERRY 