Creating Magic on Mobile

The cultural heritage sector has too often focussed on the delivery of greater amounts of information via mobile, rather than using the affordances of the technology and stories behind the content to create rich experiences. This paper will look at a project that attempted to go beyond the usual gallery guide and break out of the museum itself to create an innovative, playful and even magical experience on mobile. Magic in Modern London was conceived by Amblr and Wellcome Collection, and inspired by an exhibition that brought together five hundred amulets originally collected by Edward Lovett in London at the beginning of the Twentieth century. The exhibition itself, by Felicity Powell, was an artistic interpretation of and reaction to the amulets themselves, but those amulets also suggested a different approach. Since Edward Lovett had recorded stories about many of them in his book, Magic in Modern London, they also had both narrative and location. This indicated a project that would resite the amulets and their stories back into their original place of collection, and the natural platform to achieve this was on mobile, using GPS.