Sharing Rural Heritage with Public Situated Displays

The Wray Photo Display was deployed in a small rural community for over three years, where it collected a large number of photos relating to the community‘s history. In this paper we summarise the project and explore other ways in which photographic content that supports the community‘s heritage might be presented. Introduction Our work has focused on the use of public, situated digital displays to support a sense of community in rural environments by sharing community content. Our approach towards this goal has involved working closely with residents in Wray, a village in North West England, and deploying a functional prototype display into the village to inspire ideas and allow residents to gain experience with a situated display. The Wray Photo Display [4][5] was developed as a simple prototype capable of displaying photos uploaded by community members. The display was deployed from August 2006 till February 2010, when it was replaced by a successor system that combined photo content with events and advertisements from the community. For most of this period, the display was located in the village post office (Figure 1) and over 1,000 images were uploaded by the community, most Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). Submitted to DIS 2010 Workshop ―Heritage Inquiries: A Designerly Approach to Human Values‖. Nick Taylor Computing Department Lancaster University