Why use Bluetooth beacons? How may creating a trail or game at your institution with beacons help you deliver interpretation and widen audience engagement and develop deeper participation?

1. Bluetooth beacons allow heritage institutions to design and deliver new interpretative narratives in their spaces or galleries by tailoring a specific section of their own website pages into a hand-held guide, (by using the beacons to transmit specific URLs with content for a location to the visitor’s smartphone or tablet).

Because the beacons are small and unobtrusive they can be popped in cabinets as a labelling system or hidden in the fabric of a room without an institution going to a great expense of involving designers and printers and purchasing fixings for new interpretation boards for rooms or labels for objects in cases. 

Using the beacons can also allow a heritage institution to offer a range of audio guides to be transmitted by the beacons to be tailored for different audiences, for example, a specific interpretation narrative for a student course, or to offer a family version suitable for young children to engage with an exhibition. 

2. Bluetooth beacons allow heritage institutions to provide counter narratives in order for an audience to be directed to a distinctive approach or theme or new context for understanding a collection. 

For example, in 2007, there were counter-narratives offered at several GLAMS that were quite hard to follow at the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery to introduce the visitor to understanding the collection through the lens of the transatlantic slave trade, where a beacon trail intruded into the cases would have been more successful for the audience than trying to follow a traditional gallery brochure with a counter narrative trail of art works described in print.

3. Bluetooth beacons allow for cross-referencing collections without bringing the physical objects or manuscripts into a museum or gallery, especially useful for communicating the human interest stories to engage audiences with objects.  

For example, for TWAM to bring story-telling about the people and places of Newcastle into their Maritime gallery, they brought in letters and diaries from the archives, photos and short quotes from oral histories to display by the objects in the cases, to create a compelling human interest narrative into the exhibition display. 

However, some excellent stories were edited out because of the problem of space in the cases for interpretation labels, and if bluetooth beacons were used to enhance the understanding of objects by showing the photos and oral histories, audio readings of the diaries and letters and newspapers from partner local archives and libraries, it would allow space for ALL these materials to make a very immersive and compelling exhibition.

4. Bluetooth beacons allow for accessibility for a range of disabilities so that interpretation can be offered in several formats within a heritage site.  

For example, for autistic spectrum visitors who may like to have a preview set of pictures to see each room before they go in so that they can see the spaces and the objects virtually which may help them to make the physical  visit to each space less stressful, the beacons can provide that preview in words and pictures tailored to this audience on site.  

Also, beacons can offer audio guides to describe particular objects or pictures for partially sighted visitors and the transmitters in the beacons can help locate them to take a tour leading them to particular objects or spaces on site which they can navigate at their own pace using beacons without using a personal guide.

5. Bluetooth beacons allow for co-curation of a heritage institution or exhibition as described in the best practice for community engagement in the ‘Participatory Museum’ (see above).  

Beacons can help achieve co-curation and the community voices to be presented in an equitable manner to the voices of curators by placing both on the beacons, involving groups of users to create their own interpretation of a collection. 

For example, the HLF Young Roots funding for alternative museum experiences and geo-located interpretation would be a perfect fit for giving creative independence to a new exhibition of this kind.

6. Bluetooth beacons allow for ‘visitor voice and audience participation’ which have been piloted by Historyworks using the beacons. 

In our case studies we have transmitted URLS from the beacons with a curatorial voice and invited in the audience to creatively respond to the objects and stories, people and places described by each stop on a trail of beacons.  We’ve then captured the audiences’ artworks such as drawing and paintings, poems and songs, raps and stories, which can be captured in photography or film or audio recordings and then added these to the URLS transmitted by the beacons just a few minutes after the completion of the artwork. 

This adds ‘visitor voice’ and gives ownership to your audience and a meaning to their participation. It is also a safe way to share materials because the uploading of the new material to be transmitted by the beacons will necessarily be moderated by curators and/or custodians of the beacons during the process of capturing, editing, uploading to the beacon URLS.

7.  Bluetooth beacons allow for playfulness and gaming so that your institution can develop and deliver questing games or geo-caching or scavenger-hunts using the exhibited collection or the interpretation displayed at your heritage site as the locations for a set of clues and experiences with beacons leading the user from one clue to the next.  

This type of trail of beacons may allow a new audience to ‘take over’ your site for a clue-based trail which teams can develop on site, as happened at Bristol with a teen audience where they came away with not only a hugely enjoyable experience as a teenager in a museum, but also a vast amount of knowledge about the collection, and ownership of the story-telling, because they had developed their own trails and pathways to navigate the collections using what they learnt about the collection during the gaming activity.

8. Bluetooth beacons allow a heritage institution to reach an audience outside the physical walls of their institution in the geo-located area of up to 200 metres from the location of a beacon. 

As beacons become more widespread as a technology in our society, it will mean that you can broadcast your existence and your content to your potential audience who are in the area and have the physical web enabled on their smartphones or tablets.  This means you can use the beacons to broadcast beyond your walls or the gardens and front gates of your property, and thereby tempt in audiences who may want to know more whilst they are standing close by; and to give audiences an experience of what is within your heritage site if they are interested in visiting your site but it is currently closed to visitors.