The story of STORYBOX
How digital technology can bring culture to place
The best places in the world are packed full of culture. This is culture with a small c: the kind that is composed of small gestures, values, hopes, dreams, and artistic additions to the everyday. Almost always, it comes from people, as they travel through places in the flesh.
It is perhaps surprising, then, that an ambitious design studio in Sydney is dialling up in-place culture through a most unexpected dimension: the digital layer.
With STORYBOX, the multi-disciplinary team at Esem Projects have created a perfect marriage between the cultural, strategic, and digital layers of placemaking. Their product is a series of captivating installations that tell local stories, on-screen, right in the heart of neighbourhoods. The process is far more elaborate – a combination of community-generated content, digital activation, and constant community feedback.
Hot off the back of their latest launch in Canberra, Co-Founder of Esem Projects Dr Sarah Barns met me for coffee, to explain all about the STORYBOX ethos.
Let’s get right into it and talk about what STORYBOX is and why Esem Projects has started it. Digital media seems a surprising tool for place activation – how are you using it to bring culture into places?
We talk about STORYBOX in terms of digital placemaking. We don’t want to become just another piece of media that’s communicating to people – we want it to feel like it’s part of the place. While everybody’s used to outdoor media selling things, this isn’t an advertising platform. It’s a way to bring the community in to the experience of place, and give them ownership.
Public places are so important now to the way we think about culture, especially in the context of the pandemic lockdowns. The value of public space has been underscored by Covid, and there’s a new focus on location – meaning not just what you’re geographically connected to, but meaning what’s actually local, and how it can support you.
Public spaces have escalated in people’s attachments, and STORYBOX is about adding a new layer to way people experience these spaces.
How do the STORYBOX installations differ from more standard place-activation projects?
What’s important about STORYBOX is we’re adding a digital layer to what’s out there already, not creating anything entirely new or artificial. At Esem, we’re always being commissioned to deliver installations and storytelling pieces about place. They’re often big investments, and require a huge amount of work – engagement, historical research, design and production. It gets launched for an event or activation, but then where does it go? How does the community access it afterwards?
Learning from this, with STORYBOX we wanted to surface what’s already in a place, and let it have another life; letting it be shared in a different way. This is art and culture coming directly from members of the community, and we’re giving them the platform to showcase it in place. We might be sending a videographer down to shoot a dance group, or inviting local poets to contribute their words and experiences about the place. Nothing is invented for STORYBOX, the ingredients are already here.
Importantly, we’ve also set it up as a social enterprise, so 30% of the investment in the box infrastructure goes into commissioning local artists. The intention is that this piece of digital infrastructure supports the local cultural economy.
We’ve found in our experience that precincts and governments will fund infrastructure, but they won’t necessarily fund culture to the same extent. So with STORYBOX, we’re trying to leverage investments in digital infrastructure to better support culture.
It seems that the interactive element is really important to STORYBOX. On the installations, the public are invited to submit their own content via a QR link, and they’re also invited to complete a ‘mood ring’ survey online, which contributes to the visual mood ring shown on-screen. What’s the driving force behind this interactivity?
When we’re asking people to contribute their own content, that layer to it is pretty light touch, but it’s quite meaningful. It’s important that every installation will have that opportunity to contribute, because it makes it more of a conversation. We could have gone down a path of high-end cultural curation, which of course is fabulous, but it’s not what we’re trying to achieve with STORYBOX, which is more about everyday culture in place.
For our mood ring quiz, that’s a playful take on how we think about data. It was really popular in Parramatta, where we got 500 responses in one month. Yesterday in Canberra, we saw a bunch of kids standing around scanning the QR code, right on the first day.
I’m really interested in the user interaction experience, and the data we get is super interesting. For example, when we ask people how they’re feeling about the future, we can see that people in Parramatta are way more worried about the future than people in Sydney. It’s a tool that can tell us a lot, and right now we’re just working out the best way to use it.
For example, Parramatta Council included the question: what do you think about Parramatta Square? Because it was a new development, and they wanted to test public opinion. That was really useful because there were a lot of positive responses, whereas on the usual channels, you get a lot of anti-development sentiment.
So beyond developing and exploring the possibilities of interactivity, where is STORYBOX going next?
We’re in a place where we’re trying to get the core ingredients right, before we take it further. I’m really interested in issues of community vulnerability and resilience, and I think that tools like ours, ones that help connect people to place and to each other, are only going to increase in importance.
In terms of new projects on the horizon, we’re doing one with the City of Sydney and Red Room for Poetry month in August, and then we’re delivering a touring project for the Australian Museum on Gould’s Birds of Australia, travelling through regional and rural neighbourhoods in New South Wales. That will be about bird habitats, but always in the context of place. And we’ve just launched a new program in Canberra with a number of major cultural institutions there, exploring ways to bring cultural knowledge and collections out into the city streets.
In all of our projects, the STORYBOX cubes we have are the ‘hero’ asset. But STORYBOX is actually all about the partnerships and conversations we’re cultivating about place, because it’s care for places that sits at the heart of what we do.
It’s an ethos of place, as much as it is a physicality, and that’s what continues to drive us.
