11:17 min
Designing the Route
- Start mapping
- Accessibility
- Length of the Suggested Route
- Shape of the route
- Start and finish points
- Along the Route
00:02 Welcome to module five. We’re going to think here about what’s involved in thinking through the root of your trail. Again, just like module four, there’s no right and wrong here, but hopefully this will give you a number of things to think through before you get started and hopefully save your time down
00:19 the track. So we’d invite you first of all to start thinking about this as a, as a, as a map.
00:25 So we’re going to start with the mapping process really with a beginning and an endpoint or how this works as a choreographed experience.
00:32 We often use hand drawn maps. You can see a hand drawn map here from miles from 2021. And the great thing.
00:42 About this one was I think we did nail down quite quickly what the route was around the streets anticipating things like crossing the highway, where hotspots might go, the duration of the trail itself.
00:58 And you can see we’re playing around. There were certainly some changes in the making of the. But generally we kind of healed it down fairly early on and this made our life a lot easier with this project.
01:13 But I wouldn’t suggest that you just have to stick to handle on maps. You could if you wanted to explore map based apps like this one here, which we’ve used sometimes to chart the.
01:30 You could even print out something like a Google map and annotate it yourself. It’s really up to you. I suggest you don’t get to hung up on the software.
01:42 Keep it simple and really have a bit of fun. The next thing we’d encourage you to think about here is the access to various points.
01:51 Bearing in mind that hotspots are often referring to places, you need to think through whether these places are going to be available.
01:58 If, for example, you think that the gates are going to close at five o’clock at nine. Or there is major construction work that’s going on, you might want to anticipate this in some way.
02:08 You might want to have your hotspot referring to a space through the gate. Or you might not want to go actually in here.
02:16 So just anticipate this and it’s going to save you a lot of hassle later on down the track. Okay, another thing that you might want to think about is the length of your actual trail.
02:27 And, and this can really depend on the site in question, but generally we would say. Don’t kind of make it too small and don’t make it too big, but it does depend really on kind of where your site is.
02:41 For example, cities are often very crowded and competing spaces that will compete for your attention. And there’s often a lot of things you’ve got to watch out for in cities and they’re often not so great for kind of.
02:55 If there’s peripheral noise in contrast, you’ll find that the country places often make for a more concentrated listening experience and also to if people have made it to regional places, then they’re often more willing to walk the distance.
03:13 We generally suggest you don’t make a sound trail less than about 500 meters and more. We’re going to talk about that a couple of kilometers at most, but again, that does depend on the, the sign question.
03:24 And I think you do need to kind of spell it out to listeners before they’re starting. And we come back to module four, what we talked about the proposition.
03:32 I think you need to tell people what they’re up for. So the next point I’d like to cover is this idea of the shape of the route in relation to the landscape or the tracks which are available on the site.
03:48 So here we’ll. Looking at an app screenshot of the sound trails app. In this first case we’re looking at the mile sound trail.
03:55 So bearing in mind here that we’ve got this range of of coloured fields that we can see and we’re only looking at the standard hotspots.
04:04 We’re not looking at the background or instructional hotspots. The thing that’s really super important here is that we’re following a trail.
04:11 And we’re trying to anticipate the route or the direction that a user will go so they don’t get caught in a pickle.
04:20 So you can see here we’ve got this red line and it’s probably a little bit hard to see but we’ve got starting points here.
04:26 But generally what we’ve got here with the miles is we’ve got a circular route where the user and in no way are doubling back on on on the on the track which makes for a very nice configuration for a sound trail.
04:42 And generally with most down trails this is what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a clear route with a beginning and end in some sort of circular format.
04:52 But this is not always possible. For example here with Bullrock we’ve got a finish and a start point which is at a car park.
05:02 We’ve also got two possible routes that you can go up to the summit. So you can obviously go up one route and then when you’re coming down you can go down the other route.
05:12 The dilemma here is you need to tell people that and you also have there at the end a trail up towards the summit where they’re going to also be coming back down again.
05:23 So I don’t want to go into how we deal with this but I think that’s going to be dealt with later on but I just want to point this out because we are really trying to anticipate how we work this through using hotspots in a way.
05:38 So we all thought through choreographed experience. Here’s another example of a sound trail which is Campbell’s Creek down in Victoria along a riverbed.
05:48 It’s quite a built up place but you can see that you can walk this one either from north south or south north and we’ve got one hotspot at the north.
06:04 So that’s a different way you might approach a trail. Lastly we’ve got here the Aboriginal diggers in Morrie in New South Wales and this gives the listeners the capacity to be able to pretty much walk where they want into a rain.
06:22 It’s not set around a route, you’re not giving them a direction. It’s a fairly small area. We wouldn’t suggest with any sound trail that you go much smaller than this area.
06:34 The Aboriginal diggers Morrie Cemetery sound trail is around 400 metres along and 200 metres wide and that’s about the smaller.
06:45 So, in continuing on, let’s think about the start and the finish points of your sound trail. As you remember from my, the start points really pivotal in, in capturing people’s attention.
07:02 We find that often people will want to be able to drive to a place and then they’ll get out of their car and they’ll boot up the app.
07:10 The signage is super useful because it alerts people to the fact that there’s something here. And if you have the, capacity for people to be able to download, either using Wi-Fi or they’ve got good coverage, this is really great.
07:24 This is not always the case, but at least the signage alerts people to the fact that, that this is where it begins.
07:33 So if this is the start point, then you might want to think about how easy is this to get here.
07:38 Can people walk here? Is it near a town? Is it you know, only accessible via public transport? You know, just how easy is this place to get to?
07:50 And and don’t also forget too that, that start points can be the, the places where you return back to. So bearing in mind that you don’t want to unnecessarily sort of play the same information again at the start and the finish point, you probably need to take this into account.
08:08 Or if you know that they’re arriving back to the start point, then you might want to factor that in so that you’re both welcoming people and you’re also fair-welling them as well.
08:20 So the start and the finish points are quite pivotal in terms of how you th- think through the root of your sound trowel and you if you can get signage on site, it’s, it’s very useful, a very useful opportunity to engage people.
08:38 So let’s have a s- think about some of the things that we would think about on the root, on the actual trail itself. 08:46 So when we’re in the middle of a sound trail, we’re really looking for what are the, the, the great pl- places to, to put our stories or to lift up these voices on the audio walk.
08:59 So are there points that give people great views? Can they see compelling buildings? Are there, are there things that are going to peak their curiosity?
09:11 Are there good spots for listening? Are there good spots for sitting down? Is it nice and sh- 80 in summer?
09:18 Or are there things to kind of watch out for? Are there, are there other places where you would suggest people listen?
09:26 Are they, are they quiet or are they noisy? Is there are there, are there dangers involved in the route that you’ve kind of set people off on?
09:35 You know, for instance, are there busy roads? Can it get a little bit scary? Scary at night, like in some cities could people even get hurt?
09:42 If there’s something they’ve got to negotiate on the site like a fence, they’ve got to climb over or stones they’ve got to hop across.
09:52 You’ve probably got to sort of take it into account that there’s going to be a range of people who are doing your trail and some of them are going to have mobility issues as well.
10:01 So this is the point where you really want to think things like this through, if people are doing it in daylight, if they’re doing it at night time, and how to mitigate against this.
10:12 So in finishing off, we would invite you to the site. I invite you to get out onto your site and to start really testing it out.
10:22 Start walking the trail, start thinking about what some of the considerations are in terms of your route, in terms of the the possibility of the capabilities that might be there for creating compelling listening experiences.
10:36 Start anticipating all of these things that we’ve been talking about and really get in and get down and dirty on this.
10:43 So, in finishing off with module five, we would encourage you to sketch up a map, mark up the route, the start and finish points, add different storage areas, potential hotspots, what might be walked, what might be listened to, where someone might be sitting down, have a lot of fun, and I think once
11:04 you’ve done all of this, you’re really starting to get ready to go. Thank you, that’s module five.
- Sketch up a mud-map
- Mark up the route, start and finish points
- Add different story areas / potential hotspots
other Modules:
