Rock Art Mobile is a mobile project based in rural Northumberland around Neolithic and Bronze Age Rock Art. 

Please introduce yourself, and tell us the name of your project and what your involvement is with it:

Rock Art on Mobile Phones (RAMP), was created by a small research team at the International Centre for Heritage and Cultural Studies (ICCHS) at Newcastle University. The team was split between digital media specialists (Areti Galani and Debbie Maxwell), and archaeologists (Aron Mazel and Kate Sharpe).

What does the project / app do?

Rock art, or cup and ring marked stones, is prolific and well documented in Northumberland, however, there is virtually no on-site interpretation about these Neolithic and Early Bronze Age heritage resources. RAMP provides a way for visitors to not only locate key rock art carvings in the rugged rural landscape but also to access a rich set of resources (text, diagrams, photographs, and audio) about the carvings and landscape.

RAMP is primarily a set of websites, so any Internet enabled mobile device can access the content; there is also a physical component in the form of limited signage on way marked posts. These provide a range of ways to use RAMP, as visitors without phones can still engage with the rock art through the physical signs, albeit in a more limited manner.

RAMP was developed with the participation of the local community which informed not only technical decisions but the type of content and conceptual design. During the design process (which included a visitor survey and co-experience workshops with participants), we established that current visitors to the rock art sites often hail from the local area and regularly visit the countryside or they can be from further afield. Despite taking mobile phones with them for safety may rarely use them on site.

We expect that RAMP will provide regular countryside visitors with the opportunity to locate and experience heritage resources which they know occur in the area but have not been able to find; in other instances it will encourage visitors to make fresh and unexpected discoveries. The project has also used dialogic text (and audio) to encourage members of the public to speculate as to why these enigmatic ancient carvings were made and to share their thoughts with other visitors on-site and online and via various social media (e.g. facebook and twitter).

How have you implemented it, from a technical perspective – and why?

RAMP is a series of mobile websites covering three physical rock art locations in rural Northumberland. Each mobile website has three parallel versions to provide a tiered experience for a range of device capabilities; a low end, non-JavaScript, small screen version, a mid-range version, and a JQuery Mobile version for iPhones. These three versions share the same content wherever possible (e.g. text, image captions, audio files) but have different image resolutions to minimise size of downloaded files. In addition, to minimise page loads, the mid and high versions use JavaScript wherever possible and HTML5’s offline caching in an attempt to overcome any variable phone signal.

One of the key challenges for RAMP was to direct visitors around a rural landscape. Our three rock art locations, whilst rugged, are relatively featureless and seasonally changing, which makes directions, without the use of GPS, difficult. Our approach was to make use of wooden way markers (which were largely pre-existing), adding small signs with our web address, QR code and visual map of rock art site.

We decided to develop for the mobile web rather than creating a platform-specific app for several reasons; as our user group in general has quite low specification phones and visitor numbers at the rock art sites are modest, this means that building an iPhone or Android app would dramatically cut the number of visitors able to access RAMP. Similarly, downloading an app either requires pre-visit planning (which our research told us was unlikely) or strong network signal at the initial call to action – and rural Northumberland is not noted for its strong phone signal! A RAMP feasibility study did demonstrate that mobile signal is usable at the sites but it is patchy, and unfortunately, is particularly poor at the car park entrances to the sites. A final concern for developing an app was ‘future-proofing’. As mobile technology is evolving rapidly no app or website will ever be truly future-proof, but we felt that the mobile web not only offered easier maintenance, but also provided a more stable, widely accessible way to present interpretation, especially as there are no immediate plans for future development of RAMP.

How are you marketing the app? How is it doing in terms of downloads / use / etc?

RAMP was launched in early July 2011 at one of the project rock art areas, Lordenshaw, near Rothbury. Promotional material was produced including RAMP thermal mugs and a set of postcards for the three rock art areas, which were distributed to local tourist information centres. The launch was accompanied by a Newcastle University press release (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/new-mobile-project-rocks) which generated interest in the local press and led to RAMP being mentioned on several blogs and archaeology news websites.

Through its lifecycle, the project has also published updates and information on WordPress (http://rockartmobile.wordpress.com/), Twitter and Flickr.

Finally, our on-site signage directs visitors to the website through QR code and web address.

Are you tracking stats? If so, what are these telling you?

Yes, we are tracking stats through the websites; there is limited data at present, which, however, indicates that there is interest at the rock art sites.

Can you tell us a bit more about the financial model?

RAMP was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) grant to Newcastle University in 2010-11. The 12-month project was tasked with using participatory design techniques to sensitively develop a set of interpretation materials for mobile devices which would be used at rock art sites in Northumberland. Although the grant covered the full financial cost, the development of the project involved a variety of organizations (e.g. the Northumberland National Park Authority, The Northumberland County Council, the Archaeology Data Service, the Fowberry Estate and the Wooler Golf Club).

RAMP does not charge any money to access the websites, although visitors may be charged to access the Internet by their service providers.

Can you give a ballpark estimate of how much it cost to implement? (“no” is fine!)

It is important to remember that RAMP was delivered as part of a research-led project, and that this is reflected in the costing model. The total cost of the project was £150K. This included the entire participatory design process, which involved a visitor study and a feasibility study, five co-experience workshops, analysis, conceptual design, prototyping, implementation and evaluation of the applications, along with material costs including printing of metal signs, promotional materials and travel costs for presenting the project in conferences. All development and content creation of the mobile web apps and the desktop site were done by the research team, which included two contracted Research Associates, with some small elements of design work outsourced.

What are the things you’ve learnt most about as you’ve gone through the project?

Not to be guided by technology. At first glance, everyone seems to be developing mobile apps, but it’s important to cut through the hype and decide what would work best for the setting of your project. If we’d gone for an iPhone app for example, we could have added GPS functionality to guide visitors directly to each rock art carving, and perhaps allowed users to ‘feel’ their way around the rock with haptic feedback and accelerometers, but our RAMP visitor numbers would have suffered too much. The design was guided by our understanding of how visitors are likely to experience the rock art sites, as emerged in the co-experience workshops, and not by the possibilities of the latest technology.

We also learned that in rural heritage settings access to rich digital resources should be balanced with the visitors’ need to experience the natural environment and to apply their own pace in their exploration rather than being strictly guided by a mobile tour.

What would you differently next time, and why?

Technically, we would not use JQuery Mobile! This is still at a very early development phase, and while it bodes well for future more ‘native like’ UI, at present it is buggy and unpredictable. Issues with the lack of ‘pinch-zoom’ functionality on Android phones still give us nightmares!

We would also persevere with the integration of creative elements in the applications (such as the chance for visitors to listen to music related to the area or to generate poems while on-site). Although these elements were explored in the design process and were favorably seen by a number of our participants, issues of copyright and moderation restricted us from implementing them in this instance.

How are you thinking about growing the project?

At present there are no plans for either extending RAMP to other rock art sites, or for redeveloping the content. We are, however, in the process of publishing our conclusions on the project, reflecting primarily on the design process and the project’s role in archaeological and cultural heritage interpretation.

Tell us anything else that you think might be useful to people thinking about building mobile apps

Speak to your audience, engage with their experiences and talk to them again (and again, if you get the chance!). If your audience use iPhones then an iPhone app might be the best way to go, but if not, then perhaps a web app might be more appropriate. But don’t just focus on their technical skills or habits, explore how they use and experience their environment; this could have a critical bearing on how you structure your mobile offering.