Voices from the Trenches

A prototype soundscape installation for a heritage site in the Italian Alps, comprising the remains of a fortified camp and trenches from World War I, at which soldiers who died in the war had been buried. To use the soundscape, a visitor to the site would either carry a digitally-augmented book or wear a digitally-augmented belt while walking around the site. Built-in speakers would play audio when the visitor approached. The visitor could choose different themes for the audio—stories about the dead, nature facts about the area, strange facts and anecdotes, and volunteers' accounts of their favourite places—by moving a bookmark in the book or a set of cards in the belt. This system was the predecessor to the "Companion Novel" prototype developed as part of the meSch project at Sheffield Hallam University.

Daniela Petrelli

Nick Dulake

Mark T. Marshall

Anna Pisetti

Elena Not

Petrelli, D., Dulake, N., Marshall, M. T., Pisetti, A., & Not, E. (2016). Voices from the War: Design as a Means of Understanding the Experience of Visiting Heritage. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1033–1044. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858287