Loci Stories: Exploring Design for Polyvocality

Video

We describe the design of Loci Stories – a networked storytelling cabinet which uses voice recognition to tell colourful and unique stories from volunteers working at an English country hall. Loci Stories was created as part of a wider co-design research within heritage venues that sought to improve interpretation and designs approaches engaging with polyvocality. The work aimed to nuance existing authorised heritage discourse interpretations by championing the stories of volunteers who have a unique perspective on the place. We contribute an account of our design and its evaluation findings to propose four “textures” of polyvocality inspired by music theory – monophony, homophony, polyphony, and cacophony. We discuss Loci Stories through the lens of these textures and situate our work in furthering the design space of polyvocal heritage-based interaction design.