This paper [1] details Time Telescope, a digital art installation focused on the history and heritage of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead (referred to in the paper under the brand-name NewcastleGateshead), and the design process behind it - a participatory process involving students and young people as part of local engagement efforts on the part of BALTIC, the gallery which the installation was designed for. The paper describes the artifact itself in some amount of detail, but places equal (or sometimes greater) importance on the process itself, of engaging young people and fostering research, discussion, learning, and experimentation as part of designing Time Telescope.
This is what intrigued me about this paper - the treatment of the in-depth design process as of equal importance to the project as a whole. Ultimately, the thing described in this paper is a deeply altruistic design, and one that I admire - I consider having knowledge of local heritage to be incredibly important, and as well as that I sympathise heavily with the thoughts of some of the young people involved (noted towards the end of the paper), which point out the value of providing a space of structured experimentation in order to foster skills and talents that, in the normal course of primary education, remain largely untouched or tossed to the wayside. In Time Telescope, BALTIC and the project's organisers are not only educating people who visit the gallery and view the installation, but are also educating the people involved in designing the project, and opening up new worlds and avenues to them that they may have been all but unaware of beforehand, and exposing them to history they might otherwise have passed by.
This kind of student engagement is incredibly exciting to me, partly because it was something that, until college, I had no real access to. That sense of discovery and the acquiring of interesting new sets of skills is vital and powerful at the ages the people involved in this project were at (16-22, as detailed in the paper). Through projects such as this, a person's eyes can be opened to possibilities outside those demarcated by the rigid hierarchical approach to subjects in contemporary primary and secondary education.
[1] Guy Peter Schofield. 2014. Time telescope: engagement with heritage through participatory design. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117-120. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598517
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