Summary
IN PROGRESS
OPEN PROJECT · CHALMERS
LOCATION-BASED
MOBILE WEB
HERITAGE
2026
Traces
Hidden stories that reveal themselves as you walk through an outdoor place — first at Reading Old Cemetery.
ROLE
Solo project · research, design and build
TIMELINE
Aug 2026 – ongoing
PLATFORM
Phone website + editor for volunteers
PARTNER
University of Reading · #ROCuP
SUPERVISOR
Aris Alissandrakis
Reading Old Cemetery holds many personal histories that a visitor walking through it cannot see. How can mobile and spatial interaction connect place-based stories with the physical place, so that visitors look at what is in front of them rather than at a screen?
Concept, research, interaction and visual design, the visitor and editor web apps, testing, and a written guide for volunteer editors.
A working prototype published online: a phone website for visitors, and an editor that lets volunteers without a technical background add stories to any outdoor place.
Still in progress. This page shows the current prototype; findings from the field study at Reading Old Cemetery will be added once it has been run.
Design decisions
Four key design decisions, plus the editor that makes it reusable.
01
Curiosity first: titles stay hidden
A story announces itself 50 metres away, but its title stays hidden until it is unlocked. As the visitor comes closer, short fragments appear one by one, opening a gap in what they know so they want to find out what the place holds.
02
The question is the proof of presence
Most stories end with a question about something only visible at the spot, such as a word on a gravestone or a year in an inscription. The final, most precise step moves from the phone’s GPS to the visitor’s own eyes — and it is the step that makes them look closely.
03
Designed for imprecise GPS
Phone GPS is only accurate to several metres, so every location step has a way through: fragments stay once found, a reached spot closes only after the visitor has clearly left for ten seconds, rough readings get an allowance, and anyone who can’t answer can still open the story.
04
A story you open like an archive
An unlocked story opens as a stack of archive folders: cover, text, photos, audio, the fragments you collected and a visitors’ book. A round ink stamp marks a question answered at the spot, and the visitors’ book shows on which days others found the same story.
EDITOR
Built for volunteers, not developers
Volunteers add a story in five plain-language steps, with a live phone preview, an optional step-by-step guide, a test mode and a 33-page written guide. No cemetery-specific words, so any group can use it for a park, a campus or a heritage site.
How it works
STEP 01
Open the website
Scan the QR code. No app and no account; your location stays on your phone.
STEP 02
Walk around
A story appears in the list when you come within 50 metres — without its title.
STEP 03
Follow the fragments
Short clues appear one by one as you get closer; a dashed ring on the map marks where the next one waits.
STEP 04
Answer at the spot
Look closely and answer the question to open the story and earn the stamp.
Research
Where it started
#ROCuP, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the local community, has researched the cemetery’s life stories and shares them online and in a GPS audio guide. But the material isn’t always tied to what the visitor is looking at: some monuments have disappeared, and the histories behind individual graves are invisible to someone walking past.
WHAT SHAPED THE DESIGN
01
Place, not space
A grave can be a coordinate to reach, or a place with a history. Traces aims for the second (Harrison & Dourish, 1996).
02
Magic moments
Visitors value the moments when what they hear matches what they see around them (Reid et al., 2005).
03
Seamful design
Design with the limits of GPS instead of hiding them (Chalmers & Galani, 2004).
04
Curiosity as a gap
Curiosity arises from a gap in what we know, so the story is revealed bit by bit (Loewenstein, 1994).
Research question & scope
What’s next
Next: testing it where it matters.
So far, how well Traces supports meaningful engagement is argued from design decisions and related work, not yet shown with visitors. The next step is a field study at Reading Old Cemetery with #ROCuP volunteers and visitors: do people look at the place, how do they use the fragments and the question, and what do they remember afterwards?
NEXT STEPS
A field study at Reading Old Cemetery with volunteers and visitors
An area-based archive for places where many stories sit close together
A login and database rules before the editor is handed to volunteers
Ways to take part: hints for the next visitor and memories added by the public
Open Project · Supervisor: Aris Alissandrakis · External partner: Prof. Yota Dimitriadi, University of Reading (#ROCuP) · Chalmers University of Technology