Exeter Impact Awards Focus: Time Trails

Led by researcher Prof Gabriella Giannachi with support from Project partners: The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, 1010 Media, and Exeter City Football Club Supporter’s Trust the Time Trails project uses award-winning research to design mobile App experiences which link history with real places.

A bespoke web-app was developed to deliver content from RAMM's collections, spanning over 100,000 years of history, to generate Exeter tours. This was then adopted by Exeter City Football Club Supporters Trust, whose archives of visual and material culture were used toshare the oral history of the club.

The research builds on the success of Moor Stories; a mobile web app which displays mixed media stories about objects in RAMM’s collection originating from Dartmoor.

The team partnered with Exeter City FC Supporters Trust to research the how by providng a similar service to with pieces of the club’s heritagecould begin creative engagement, prompt memories, aid mobile learning  and help create an identity and a sense of community among the clubs fanbase.

Time Trails is grounded in award-winning esearch into the use of trajectories for the design of mixed reality experiences based on how to use  time, space, interfaces and minimal role-play to bring together the physcial and the digital.

Using  RAMM’s collections and Exeter City FC’s archive to explore the history of the streets of Exeter, the team produced a bespoke web-app currently hosting five trails, Three of which were tailor made for this project by the team.

Thus far Time Trails’ direct short term benefits have included:

• supporting RAMM’s policy of making their collections as easy to access by as many people as possible; 
• the digitisation and use of archival materials from Exeter City FC’s Supporters Trust thus far not seen by the public; the use of these materials in the Kick Start learning context; the application of the findings from Time Trails to another Exeter City FC Supporters Trust project, including the launch of a website accompanying an exhibition to mark the centenary of a historical match against Brazil (November 2013);
• the setting up of the commercialisation of Time Trail so that it may be sold to other sport groups (i.e. golf) and organisations (i.e. breweries);
• a keynote presentation at the international conference by Giannachi in Lisbon, June 2013, attended by over 100 museum curators and preservation experts from all over the world.