The challenge

The UK heritage sector faces significant pressures around digital skills and AI literacy, with most available learning resources either generic, quickly outdated, or adapted from tech and business contexts where the underlying assumptions do not always translate. The Arts Marketing Association, as part of its work on the National Lottery Heritage Innovation Fund programme, sought to explore how the sector might build AI literacy and digital confidence at scale, and to develop a concept worth taking forward to full funding application.

The approach

The Test Phase centred on co-creation with heritage professionals rather than the imposition of a pre-defined solution. Three cohorts were convened in London, Manchester, and online across the four nations, involving around forty participants from museums, galleries, and heritage organisations of different sizes and focuses. Sessions were designed in response to the previous one rather than in advance, allowing the direction of the work to follow what participants were surfacing rather than what had been assumed at the outset.

The solution

Along with the AMA team, I helped lead the co-creation sessions across the three cohorts, using a responsive facilitation approach that gave participants room to shape the work substantively. Several priorities surfaced consistently: a desire for resources that would stay current rather than date quickly, knowledge rooted in the sector's own experience rather than adapted from elsewhere, and stronger connections with peers doing similar work in other organisations.

Drawing on these findings, and on Wikipedia as a model of a self-updating, community-built resource, I authored the core concept that developed the cohort's insights into a coherent platform. Users would share real-world experiments as "field reports," captured through an AI-led conversational interview and fed into a shared knowledge base that learned continuously from its contributors. I named it Goose.

The impact

Goose became the basis of the Grow Phase funding application. In October 2024, the National Lottery Heritage Innovation Fund awarded the project £250,000 to develop towards a minimum viable product. The architecture authored during the Test Phase, including the field reports mechanism, the conversational interview approach, and the layered knowledge structure, was preserved into the subsequent developer brief.

With thanks to Cath Hume, Carol Jones, Jacqueline Haxton, Paul Blundell, and the team at the Arts Marketing Association for the invitation to partner on this project and their support throughout.