Audiences and Evaluation

Context

We are overseeing Unpath’d Waters’ interactions with all audiences, ensuring our work is relevant, meaningful, and accountable to the public.

We are particularly concerned about reaching three target groups, some of whom are typically excluded from participation in maritime heritage. These groups include blind and visually impaired people, non-coastal (inland) communities who may not identify with the sea, and cross-disciplinary natural science and cultural researchers.

Together with these audiences, we will:

• set shared values for Unpath’d Waters
• co-design, test, and evaluate our outputs with our partners on the Designing, Connecting, Immersing activity
• host demonstrations of our designs for different communities in several locations.

Aim

There are five main tasks associated with this activity, all intended to make certain that Unpath’d Waters is people-centred and values-led.

1. We are setting shared values for the project in line with the Digital Culture Charter, including measures that will hold us accountable to them. These values are intended to provide a shared vision for Unpath’d Waters. They will help us identify and understand the potential benefits and risks of our technologies and outputs for different users. The values will also guide our decision-making, and hold the project team to account for specific goals so that we can track learning and impacts over time.
2. We are conducting audience research to identify and ensure representation of, three key user groups in Unpath’d Waters’ activities. This research will help us to understand the needs of our target audiences. It means there will be the right support for these audiences to participate fully in our design and testing activities and in our programme of public demonstrations of designs and outputs.
3. In partnership with the Designing, Connecting, Immersing activity, we will consult with these audiences and work with them to design our immersive experiences. We’ll use this work to evaluate how effective and inclusive our approach to collaborating with audiences in the design process is. We will also update our values to ensure they reflect the interests of our users.
4. Alongside the Designing, Connecting, Immersing activity, we’ll test the experiences that have been designed together with members of our three key audience groups. Here we are looking to ensure that the experiences make sense to our audiences, are accessible, and have the impacts on users that we intended. Based on feedback from our audiences, we will adjust the prototypes to improve them.
5. We will host a programme of exhibits that may include demonstrations of the prototypes or displays of other outputs we’ve created together with our audiences. These exhibits may be experienced online or in-person, and the location of the in-person experiences will be determined in conversation with our partners and our audiences.

Outputs

We’ve created six values for Unpath’d Waters, which we will hold ourselves to. These values are published on the About page and will be updated across the life of the project as we evaluate our activities together with our audiences. Like all values, we anticipate they will change over time as we learn more about our audiences, our data, our technologies, and the possibilities that come through experimenting with them.

This article has been re-posted from our collaborators. See the original post.

Activity collaborators

• National Maritime Museum
• CITiZAN – Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network