Reanimating Shelley’s Heart: breathing new life into locative learning with dual process design.

Abstract

Shelley’s Heart is a locative learning tool geo-linked to the churchyard where Mary Shelley is buried along with the heart of her husband, poet Percy Shelley. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this interactive multi-media project debuted on Halloween night, 2018. Featuring biographical facts, quotes and fictional narratives related to the Shelleys and their friends, John Keats and Lord Byron, it provides an active learning experience that is freely available to the general public. Locative projects often feature either factual information (museum audio guides), or fictional stories (ambient literature), but Shelley’s Heart combines fact and fiction in order to promote critical thinking. Refining this approach required extensive trial and error experimentation, collaborative brainstorming, user testing, and several phases of production. Insights garnered from this process led to the development of strategies that simultaneously promote implicit and explicit cognition. Cognitive science refers to this interplay as, the ‘dual process model’ (Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This paper explores how the creation of Shelley’s Heart led to the development of three key dual process design strategies: ‘Match,’ ‘Affect’ and ‘Prime,’ collectively known as ‘MAP.’