Volunteers are an underused but important resource in presenting plural heritages within large heritage organizations. We report on a qualitative study at a heritage site in the UK which combined explorations of volunteers' practice and digital design. The study comprised of observational fieldwork with co-creative activities across eight linked workshops, where we explored the site with volunteers, and how we might leverage existing working structures to make new design prototypes. Our collective account contributes new insights on working with volunteers and the opportunities that arise from acknowledging them as genius loci - recognising them as experts of their own experience and capturing and supporting their skills as storytellers. Working with the volunteering staff in a co-design process we created innovative designs including our Un-authorised View, which draws out the unique perspectives and the personal stories at heritage destinations.

Co-design with communities interested in heritage has oriented itself towards designing for polyvocality to diversify the accepted knowledges, values and stories associated with heritage places. However, engagement with heritage theory has only recently been addressed in HCI design, resulting in some previous work reinforcing the same realities that designers set out to challenge. There is need for an approach that supports designers in heritage settings in working critically with polyvocality to capture values, knowledges, and authorised narratives and reflect on how these are negotiated and presented in the designs created. We contribute “Designing with Genius Loci” (DwGL)—our proposed approach to co-design for polyvocality. We conceptualised DwGL through long-term engagement with volunteers and staff at a UK heritage site. First, we used ongoing recruitment to incentivise participation. We held a series of making workshops to explore participants’ attitudes towards authorised narratives. We built participants’ commitments to collaboration by introducing the common goal of creating an interactive digital design. Finally, as we designed, we enacted our own commitments to the heritage research and to participants’ experiences. These four steps form the backbone of our proposed approach and serve as points of reflexivity. We applied DwGL to co-creating three designs: Un/Authorised View, SDH Palimpsest and Loci Stories, which we present in an annotated portfolio. Grounded in research through design, we reflect on working with the proposed approach and provide three lessons learned, guiding further research efforts in this design space: (1) creating a conversation between authorised and personal heritage stories; (2) designing using polyvocality negotiates voices; and (3) designs engender existing qualities and values. The proposed approach places polyvocality foremost in interactive heritage interpretation and facilitates valuable discussions between the designers and communities involved.

We describe the design of Loci Stories – a networked storytelling cabinet which uses voice recognition to tell colourful and unique stories from volunteers working at an English country hall. Loci Stories was created as part of a wider co-design research within heritage venues that sought to improve interpretation and designs approaches engaging with polyvocality. The work aimed to nuance existing authorised heritage discourse interpretations by championing the stories of volunteers who have a unique perspective on the place. We contribute an account of our design and its evaluation findings to propose four “textures” of polyvocality inspired by music theory – monophony, homophony, polyphony, and cacophony. We discuss Loci Stories through the lens of these textures and situate our work in furthering the design space of polyvocal heritage-based interaction design.

In this paper, we relate participatory design (PD) scholarship with public history (PH) research, deepening the understanding of the relationship of PD with history, focusing on ‘history with PD’. The latter refers to when history itself is explicitly the object of participation, and we discuss it by presenting a secondary analysis of a PH project, HistorEsch, conducted through the conceptual lens of infrastructuring. In this way, we show how PD and PH practices consider the past of a place and how they relate to public formation, intermediation, and proliferation.