Breathing new life into locative learning with dual process design, and what Mary Shelley's creature can teach us about how people actually learn.
On Halloween night 2018, over 150 people gathered in a churchyard in Bournemouth to follow four paths through a locative story app linked to the graves of Mary and Percy Shelley. The project, Shelley’s Heart, had taken three years to build. It launched on the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein and is freely accessible to the public at shelleysheart.com. The grave where Mary Shelley is buried also holds the heart of her husband, the poet Percy Shelley. That image, of a physical heart kept alongside the dead, is what the whole project turns on: the idea that you can know something factually and feel it at the same time, and that the difference between those two kinds of knowing matters.
Most locative projects choose a lane. Museum audio guides deliver facts about place. Ambient literature links fictional narrative to physical location. Shelley’s Heart refuses the choice. It weaves biography, literary quotation, and original fiction together across four story-paths, each following a different character: a modern alter ego of Mary Shelley, one for Keats, one for Byron, and the ghost of Percy Shelley wandering the churchyard in search of his missing heart. The same actors play both the historical figures and their contemporary counterparts. The same colour codes tie past to present. The effect is not illustration. It is productive friction.
The design framework that emerged from this practice-led process is called MAP: three interlocking strategies for working with both kinds of cognition at once. Match holds implicit and explicit thinking in mutual tension, drawing parallels between fiction and fact so that each makes the other stranger and more interesting. Byron’s bisexuality, hidden in the nineteenth century and open in the present; Mary Shelley’s unwed motherhood, stigmatised then and unremarkable now. The contrast does not simply illustrate historical change. It asks participants to hold both worlds in mind simultaneously and feel the distance between them. Affect maps emotional experience onto factual understanding. A dramatic scene in which Modern Byron is rejected by John after an unexpected kiss primes the participant to hear Byron’s own words differently when they appear on the next page. The emotion carried by the fiction does not distort the biography. It opens it. Prime works in the opposite direction: explicit facts planted before a dramatic scene shape how that scene lands. A quiz question about Keats coughing blood is not trivia. It is foreshadowing. When Modern John collapses a few moments later, the participant already knows what it means.
These three strategies were not invented in advance. They emerged through trial and error, through table reads and field tests and staged theatrical productions, through feedback from over 300 participants and collaborators across disciplines including programming, film, sound design, and underwater photography. The theory arrived after the practice had already made it necessary.
Like Frankenstein, anyone teaching classic texts
is in the business of necromancy.
"A learning tool that effectively shifts between fact and fiction has the potential to promote critical thinking as participants are challenged to consider both explicit and implicit links between narrative invention and historical exposition."Reanimating Shelley’s Heart, Media Practice and Education, 2020
The MAP framework is not specific to Shelley, to Bournemouth, or to graveyards. It describes a general problem in the design of any learning experience that takes seriously both what people know and how they feel. Purely expository learning assumes that the right information, clearly delivered, will produce the right understanding. Purely narrative learning assumes that emotional immersion will do the work that argument cannot. Both assumptions are partial. The interesting territory is between them, where facts are emotionally charged and fictions carry historical weight.
What the practice-led process behind Shelley’s Heart demonstrates is that this territory cannot be designed from a desk. It has to be discovered through use: through watching people encounter the work, noticing where they disengage or get confused, and asking what would need to change. The sequence in which Harriet Shelley tears Percy’s heart from his chest, underwater, after both of them are dead, with lines from her actual suicide note woven into the monologue she delivers beforehand, is not a pedagogic decision. It is the result of following the material wherever the tension between fact and fiction led. The theory came later, to name what had already worked.
Effective ambiguity is not the same as confusion. It is the state where more than one interpretation is available and none of them fully resolves. That is the condition Shelley’s Heart was designed to produce: not an answer about who Percy Shelley was, but a sustained, embodied, locationally grounded uncertainty about it. Whether that uncertainty constitutes learning is a question the paper leaves open. That it constitutes engagement is not in doubt.