Memory Mapper
2023
User testing for an open-source platform enabling communities and researchers, to explore and share cultural heritage through interactive mapping.
Related resources
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Memory Mapper White paper
Memory Mapper is an innovative web-based mapping tool developed by the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in partnership with the Space Syntax Laboratory and writer/artist Rachel Lichtenstein. Born from the AHRC-funded Survey of London Whitechapel project, the platform enables users to engage with cultural heritage in interactive, accessible ways. Shortwork partnered with the Memory Mapper team to expand its user base and explore sustainable models, supporting workshops and interviews with academic, museum, and community stakeholders. Our work helped identify user needs, pain points, and opportunities, and informed the development of a clear value proposition for the platform.
Our Approach
We focused on understanding how Memory Mapper could best serve diverse users while supporting long-term sustainability:
Conducted workshops and interviews to explore user experiences, challenges, and opportunities across academic, museum/gallery, and community contexts.
Developed user personas in collaboration with illustrator Connie Dales to illustrate the needs of different audiences.
Supported the team in defining a coherent value proposition, highlighting Memory Mapper’s versatility, accessibility, and potential for wider impact.
Analysed pathways for user growth, engagement, and sustainability, ensuring the tool could reach new communities and continue to be impactful.
Key Findings
Our research revealed the ways Memory Mapper creates value for different users:
Educators: Inspire students and integrate interactive maps into teaching to illustrate research and storytelling.
Detectives: Enable curious researchers to uncover patterns and connections in their work through mapping and visualisation.
Curators: Archive, display, and share information, explore new approaches to history, support decolonisation, and co-curation.
Activists: Amplify underrepresented voices and challenge dominant narratives through participatory mapping.
Storytellers: Bring narratives to life and support collaborative fieldwork using interactive features.
Across all personas, Memory Mapper’s open, user-friendly nature was highlighted as a key strength, enabling knowledge sharing, collaborative work, and engagement with wider audiences.
Outputs
User personas visualised by illustrator Connie Dales.
Report and co-authored white paper detailing user needs, engagement insights, value proposition and routes to sustainability.
Impacts and learnings
Our collaboration with the Memory Mapper team helped clarify who the platform serves and how it can grow sustainably. The user personas have already shaped the team’s design thinking and communication, ensuring that Memory Mapper is responsive to the needs of educators, researchers, and community partners.
By focusing on practical barriers and motivations, the project strengthened the tool’s usability and accessibility, and provided a clear roadmap for expanding its reach beyond academia. The insights gained are now guiding future development and partnership-building to keep Memory Mapper open, inclusive, and relevant.
“The benefit to institutions is that they actually get to see people’s own stories and investigations told in their own words… This project has really reminded me of how academic historians can have a very constricted, prescriptive, narrow idea of what history is.”
Memory Mapper user
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