Hardwick Hall info-point

The National Trust’s Hardwick Hall has installed Info Point in its Long Gallery to help visitors easily understand its collection of paintings and tapestries, while reducing the intrusiveness of interpretation.

Presenting the portraits on visitors’ smartphones so that they can be analysed as Elizabethan ‘selfies’ gives a new perspective that makes the imagery more accessible to younger visitors. Digital enhancement of the faded Gideon tapestries enables visitors to see them exactly as they would have looked to Bess of Hardwick in the 16th Century, and explains some of the challenges of conservation. Discreet NFC tags are also available as location triggers to help seamlessly integrate the physical experience with their digital one.

The Trust’s feedback from visitors includes comments such as: ‘fantastic’, ‘easy to use’ and ‘helpful’, and an independent evaluation project reported:

“What became more apparent during analysis was what people enjoyed about the Info Point. The survey and observation results showed that visitors felt it gave them something to do when they had walked ahead of their group and that they could in turn teach their friends/partners/family what they had learnt. This practice of passing on information to others is Info Point’s biggest impact – it engages visitors with one another, allowing for the excitement of teaching bite-size yet interesting facts to one another in a way that other ‘visible’ interpretation does not allow.”