As part of a project to restore St Barrwg’s church supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the church will be used as a community resource as well as for services.

As part of their aim to provide educational material about local history and life in the church, we are developing a multi-touch table. Aimed at the existing congregation and a range of visitors including school groups, it will use a plan view of the church to explain the activities and services at the church, its artefacts, as well as its social history in ways that support the curriculum.

It’s great to be working with a new client in Bilborough, Nottinghamshire, just a mile down the road from the Wide Sky Design offices.

St Martin’s Church is a Grade II*listed building dating back to 1356 with renovation having taken place in Victorian times. But in recent years, like many older parish churches in troubled urban areas, it had fallen into disrepair. Local champion of the church, Hilary Wheat, is now realising her vision to restore the church to its former vibrant condition as well as to establish it as a focal point where the local community can address its own challenges such as poor education and health, and low employment.

 St. Martin’s Heritage Trainees

A successful Heritage Lottery Fund application sees Hilary leading a team of volunteers in a restoration project that has seen the unexpected uncovering of some precious wall paintings by mid-20th century artist Evelyn Gibbs, believed to be the last surviving examples of her large scale work.

 Evelyn Gibbs wall paintings at St Martin’s Church, Bilborough

It is exciting for us to be involved at the very beginning of their Hidden Treasures project, supporting what will be three years of community and heritage activities.

Right now we have two time-lapse cameras in place to capture the work that is being carried out. One looks down from the eaves, eight metres up, onto the floor of the church and will record the restoration activity, including the laying of a stone floor. The second, of course, is focused on those murals the restoration of which will be of national cultural interest.

The images will be used in the subsequent community projects and we will be creating a tablet-based app to interpret the history and life of the church. We’ll report back on progress.

Support St Martin’s 

St. Martin’s has been shortlisted for an English Heritage Angel Award in the ‘Best Rescue or Repair of a Historic Place of Worship’ category. The winners, as determined by a judging panel, will be announced at a ceremony in London in November.

There is an extra award, English Heritage Followers’ and Telegraph Readers’ Favourite Award, that is open to a public vote – if you’d like to support St Martin’s, simply vote here…

We’re delighted to congratulate Woodhall Spa Cottage Museum on their success in the 2014 Lincolnshire Heritage Awards, run by the Lincolnshire Heritage Forum, celebrating the work taking place in museums, historic houses and heritage sites across the county.

The museum is highly commended in the Inspiration Award for ‘The Future of Woodhall Spa Cottage Museum’ and winner of the Excellence Award.

As part of a significant redevelopment supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund we had the pleasure of developing two interactive exhibits for the Cottage Museum: Woodhall Life which explores photographic archives of the Spa and The War Years, featuring the history of RAF Woodhall Spa and 617 Squadron, the “Dambusters”, which operated from there from January 1944 to May 1945.

The soft launch of Moors for the Future’s Fire Aware project took place in July. Local school children were invited to play both the digital version of our Fire Danger game and a real life version created especially for the occasion, testing their understanding of fire risks.

They also got to take a digital version home with them on CD.

Over the next few weeks, the weather stations and the wildfire risk map will be going live at the two visitor centres and an “off line” version will be used by the Peak District Fire Operations Group (FOG) in seminars, travelling exhibitions and at schools. During the same period the interactive map and the two games will be being launched on-line via the Moors for the Future web site.

At the beginning of 2014 we installed a photo system at The World of Beatrix Potter in the Lake District, replacing a previous system that had been underperforming in terms of generating secondary spend for the attraction.

Rather than simply install the system and let it run, we actively manage the account remotely, identifying trends in its use and identifying ways to improve its profitability.

Over the first quarter of its operation, we’re happy to say that we have achieved an average increase per month of 30% over this period, which included a healthy Easter.

We are now looking at ways to develop the product to make it even more appealing. We’ll be adding to our suite of tableaux featuring favourite Beatrix Potter characters by using scenes from the original illustrations – we’re expecting them to be very popular with Beatrix Potter devotees.

This month has seen the much anticipated installation of an interactive exhibit at the Military Intelligence Museum in Bedfordshire.

The exhibit combines a flexible display space and digital exhibit which has been designed to have a lifecycle of a minimum of eight years. During this time it will interpret the role that military intelligence played during the years of the First World War and its aftermath, from 1914 to 1922.

The theme of the exhibit will change every year, starting with the birth of the Military Intelligence Corps and going on to cover topics including espionage, counter-espionage, the frontline, signals intelligence and aerial photography.

As the display of physical objects changes, so new content will be added to the digital exhibit over time, presenting a comprehensive history of military intelligence during WW1.

We were pleased to attend a recent workshop organised by our friends at AHI, exploring the provision of interpretation at wildlife sites.

It’s an area that Wide Sky Design are regularly involved with as recently opened visitor and welcome centres at Hengistbury Head, Sumburgh Head Lighthouse and Westonbirt Arborteum demonstrate.

We found the session on audience segmentation by Susan Cross (www.telltale.co.uk) very relevant. Her useful insights into the different factors motivating people when they visit sites have prompted some interesting thoughts back at base about how we can respond to these needs through selection of different media/interactive techniques.

If you are interested in how we might mix our process of “hierarchical deconstruction of interpretive objectives” with audience segmentation why not give us a call?

This month we’ve been installing interactive exhibits for the Forestry Commission at their new visitor centre at The National Arboretum in Gloucestershire.

• A touchscreen exhibit, as part of a dynamic wall map, drawing on a database of thousands of images and videos of the 600 acre site. Visitors will be able to navigate the tree collection through the images and delve deep into 160 years of the arboretum’s history and landscape.
• An interactive life cycle of the tree.
• A means of asking questions of viewers to elicit their views on conservation “hot topics” which will track responses and attitudes over time.

Opened recently by the Duchess of Cornwall, Patron of the Friends of Westonbirt Arboretum, the project has been funded by the Friends of Westonbirt Arboretum, the Forestry Commission, a £1.9m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a £500,000 Biffa Award as well as gifts from a number of foundations, trusts and generous individuals.

How do you present archive collections of materials on subjects as different as Rugby League and the British Music Collection? That was the challenge we took on as part of a Heritage Lottery Fund supported project at the University of Huddersfield’s Archives and Special Collections.

A new archive centre will make the heritage collections more accessible to everyone, free of charge and will include what we describe as a Gesture Wall in the centre’s experience zone.

A river of images from the archive database will flow across a wall around 10m in length and 3.5m high. Visitors can gesture towards a particular image to expand and enlarge it or to play a video. An inventive way to display a varied collection of images, allowing individuals to focus on their favourite topics of interest.

Here’s a sneak preview of the prototype…

The newly refurbished Sumburgh Head Lighthouse buildings were opened on 3 June 2014 in an official opening ceremony led by HRH Princess Royal.  As patron of the Northern Lighthouse Board, Her Royal Highness has visited Sumburgh Head Lighthouse many times and this visit saw her given a tour of the new facilities, the refurbished Engine Room, Foghorn and Radar Hut.

Hundreds of invited guests attended including representatives of supporters and funders, the RSPB, the Northern Lighthouse Board, Scottish Rural Development Programme, European Regional Development Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, Historic Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Scottish Natural Heritage, The Wolfson Foundation, Shetland Islands Council, and the Shetland Amenity Trust.

We were delighted to be involved in this project which has become a highlight of tourism on mainland Shetland. We developed two touch-screen interactives and several audiovisual exhibits to tell the story of the area’s outstanding wildlife. We hear HRH Princes Royal gave everyone quite a fright with the interactive fog horn!

Read our case study for Sumburgh Head Lighthouse and Marine Life Centre.