Sport & Recreation

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  Sponsored by:

  SPARC

"Wellington Sculptures: Walking tours of the public sculptures of Wellington " by Squizlers & Friends

http://www.sculptures.org.nz/

Description

Judges thought this entry encourages a nice combination of physical exercise and artistic appreciation, and is a great example of thinking creatively to get people out and active. They found it easy and intuitive to use and were impressed with the effort made to fill gaps, including taking new photos and writing new content. It would be interesting to see to how the idea could be applied further to sport and recreation and other geographic areas. Category sponsored by SPARC

$2000 is be awarded to the application that best encourages New Zealanders’ participation in sport and recreation.

Selected judges' comments:

"This was the most polished and appealing app that I saw. The content, likewise, is quality stuff, well written and with the right tone. "

"Great concept for getting tourists and locals moving through the city, a kind of 'urban trail guide' where the exercise is happening while the user is learning about sculptures and landmarks."

"Utilisation of sculpture data, walking tour data, google maps, flicker and wikipedia blended together in a very useful esthetically well designed front end."

Squizlers & Friends' description of the entry:

Though we are under no illusions that our site will change the world, we do believe our entry is awesome. We have aimed to produce a reliable, simple, functional and quality application that celebrates the great public art that Wellington has to offer. Our site takes an old idea (walking tours) and executes it with the best of what the web has to offer. Our site employs "responsive design". Responsive design ensures that the exact same content will customise itself to fit the shape of the device you choose to use it on. This means our site is not device specific. We think building iPhone specific apps OR Android specific apps is often kind of a dumb idea. The web is the universal medium and smart design should let your sites display on any device. Our site encourages people to get off their bums. We recognise that most websites are consumed by users sitting on their bums at a desktop computer. We think that smart phones can be used to make the world more fun and interesting. Our site contains some audio and links to some video. We wanted to include more, but ran out of time. We think that if someone is enjoying a sculpture, they shouldn't be looking at their phone (this is why audio is a great medium). We intend to add more audio in the future. We would also like to give artists the opportunity to provide narratives for their own pieces; digital plaques with no space or time limit. Our site is extensible. In the future, as new datasets become available we would like to add more tours, and more types of things to the tours such as historic buildings and historic locations. In the future we would like to offer others the ability to create their own tours in other cities. Our site adds to the dataset. The dataset we used seeded our site, and then we put in effort to flesh it out, research content, and bang it all together, creating narratives that would make the data more engaging. Our site [in the future] will be available offline. We're still working on this. For more info about the technologies we've used, see http://www.sculptures.org.nz/#/thanks.

Sources

Sources available at http://www.sculptures.org.nz/#/thanks