A Blended Space for Heritage Storytelling

This paper explores the role of Blending Theory, as a framework, to aid in design decisions while deploying mobile experiences for heritage storytelling. Blending Theory provides a structured way of thinking about how digital and physical spaces can be brought together to create new experiences in blended spaces. In this paper we describe the development of an app that aims to enhance the visitor experience to a heritage destination in New York State. We show how the blended spaces framework was used to guide the design and development of the app and provide evaluation data that highlights the effective UX that resulted. Heritage stories and augmented digital agents are used to guide a visitor from one point of interest to another, providing an engaging user experience for schoolchildren.