Explore cultural heritage with Go Walkeez!

Let’s go for a walk, a sniff and snap some pictures to create your own special heritage experience!

Go Walkeez is an active cultural engagement project for children that is designed to promote family conversation and visual image making. With the help of our waggy tailed Go Walkeez dogs, families go on a ‘cultural sniffing tour’ by exploring museums, galleries and other cultural sites. The dogs come with a ‘passport’ that suggests objects to sniff out. For example, ‘spot paintings of imaginary places and people’ or ‘sniff art that makes you wonder what’s going on’. When you spot interesting objects, take pictures of it with the dog for your very own ‘sniffies’ (like ‘selfies’ but of the dog). As you look for treasures, share thoughts and ideas as a family on why the things sparked your interest.

Why is this important? Well, for one, what you say and capture through the eyes of the Walkeez dogs will help heritage communities better understand what people care about most. Go Walkeez! is a unique and powerful resource tool that makes heritage engagement fun, social and inclusive. It helps get the big people in big places see what is truly important in life from your perspective.

So, let’s Go Walkeez!

Check out what some of our dogs are up to on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

About the project

Go Walkeez! is a child-centered and family-friendly way to make heritage engagement fun for the whole family. It involves taking a toy dog for a ‘culture walk’ and taking pictures as you go along spotting objects that spark interest. It is a project to nurture shared experiences between children and adults through a fun, interactive and collaborative experience. Currently, Go Walkeez! is ran as a workshop-style experience in collaboration with museums and other heritage institutions.

The project was inspired by our belief that heritage plays an important role in informing us our individual and shared values. We feel that heritage has a genuine potential to enhance our lives and provide us with the emotional and intellectual anchor to help shape our world-views, adopt new ways of thinking, and mediate our differences. Sustaining cultural heritage is no easy task. We want everyone from each generation to help nurture an active conversation and commitment to its preservation, promotion and protection.

The award-winning heritage project helps engage and foster a new generation of heritage tribes.

Since 2016, the project has become part of a PhD project at the Norwich University of the Arts. The PhD explores family learning in art museums using object based learning and digital experience learning through visitor photography and conversation analysis.

For more information, please contact Kazz.

 Awards and events

Awards

RSA-Howarth Award

Royal Society of the Arts, Student Design Award 2015

Brainchild Creative Business Award 2015

Deutsche Bank Award for Creative Enterprise 2015 (Shortlisted)

Showcasing, workshops and Public Talks

April 2020: Museum and Heritage Show 2020 session (covid impacted virtual show); Slanguage, ‘Chop it up’ Instagram live, Los Angeles

Feb 2019: SHARE Museums East annual conference

Sept 2018: GEM annual conference

August 2018: MOA Museum, Atami, Japan (one-week artist residency)

June 2018: Maverick City Symposium 2018, Liverpool

May 2018: Chiba Municipal Art Museum

August 2017: Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference (Creative Technologies and Cities)

April 2017: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, as part of CA2RE International Conference

March 2017: Future of Religious Heritage (March issue feature article)

September 2016: Norwich Cathedral

May 2016: Norwich University of the Arts

March 2016 RSA-Engage: Edinburgh

March 2016 RSA-Engage: Cambridge

December 2015 Hot-Source Innovation Forum

December 2015 BEPE (Built Environment Professional Education) Reception

Nov 2015  RSA-RDI Diploma Presentation (showcasing at the RDI Diploma presentation evening)

Oct 2015  New Anglia iExpo 2015 Innovation Event

June 2015  RSA Engage London: Design for Good Student Award 2015 (lightening talk)