AHI Webinar: Stop, look and listen: Covid safety and the QR code

Interpretation manager Steve Farrar shares a glimpse of Historic Environment Scotland’s agile interpretation programme, with particular focus on how visitors are using QR codes to access digital content at sites across the country.

Agile interpretation was born of necessity, an attempt to mitigate the impact on the visitor experience of partial and full site closures as a result of Covid-19 safety measures. It was designed to be nimble, low-cost, creative and temporary while based on robust interpretive principles.

A key strand of the programme has been the use of QR codes. Visitors scan these with their own devices to access digital content. This has included site-wide BSL guided tours; 30-second videos that soar to the tops of towers or plunge into the depths of medieval wells; site staff showing visitors favourite, hidden corners of their sites; recordings of religious music, folksong and military bands; clips of Monty Python and newsreel footage; poetry and prose from Walter Scott for the 250th anniversary of his birth; narrative fictions developed through community engagement with the Lyceum Youth Theatre, Deaf Action Scotland Youth Group and Sabhal Mor Ostaig and a chance to learn some site-specific Gaelic words.

The programme has been running for 12 months now. And like all one-year olds, it’s developing at an astonishing rate, it’s unbelievably ambitious albeit a little unsteady on its feet, it doesn’t yet know its limits and everyone is telling us what they think of it. That last aspect of the programme – the constant visitor feedback through usage data and the rolling visitor surveys bundled up with online ticketing – is particularly exciting. Having our visitors to advise us is enabling us to engage in an unprecedented exercise in experimentation and respond rapidly to problems, failures and outright successes.

This live webinar will be of interest to anyone curious as to how QR codes might be used for interpretation – and what happens in practice.

This webinar will be run on Hopin, register online and an invitation will be sent to you a day or two before the event.