The Secret Life of Cumbria is a book written by the people of Cumbria. A collection of stories about escape, love, grief, and favourite T-shirts!

Anyone who lived, worked in or visited Cumbria in 2008 could write their own pages by sending a text message or visiting this web site. The pages of the book are all collected here.

Cumbria is a big place, both in the world and in our imaginations, with as many paths through it as there are people who live in or visit it. You can read Cumbria's Secret Life by finding your own way through this site, moving from place to place.

The Secret Life of Cumbria is an exploration of how creative technology can build platforms and open channels for a local authority to undertake consultation. It explores not only which technologies to use, but how to understand what consultation means.

Like a traditional survey, Secret Life of Cumbria asks questions, but these questions are designed to generate rich, personal responses, for example “What is your method of escape?” (read the answers here) or “Imagine you are a child looking out of your bedroom window, what can you see and hear?” (read the answers here).

Secret Life of Cumbria enabled people who live, work in and visit Cumbria to answer these questions through this web site or by text message. Text messages were used because mobile phones are the only technology that everyone carries with them everywhere. They are the most welcoming, everyday technology: no one is intimidated or uncomfortable about sending texts. This makes them a huge potential resource for consultation, enabling ordinary people to make their voices heard.

Using mobile phones meant that Secret Life of Cumbria was a partnership with arts and cultural organisations across Cumbria. To take part, these organisations simply put up a poster at their venue asking a Secret Life question.

A Secret Life of Cumbria poster at Tullie House gallery in Carlisle.

Visitors and audiences could answer a question by text there and then, while they were in the venue, so rather than being a retrospective, web-based experience, Secret Life of Cumbria was part of the life of places across Cumbria.

Secret Life of Cumbria was embedded in the landscape of Cumbria through the partner venues, and landscape and geography are also a metaphor for navigating the Secret Life archive. Secret Life is a book of the things that people in the region care about. Anyone who lived, worked in or visited Cumbria in 2008 could write their own pages and they are all collected here - stories about escape, love, grief and favourite T-shirts! Visitors to the Secret Life of Cumbria can read the book not by turning from page to page but by moving from place to place.

Secret Life of Cumbria has undertaken consultation by generating rich responses from the people who live in and visit Cumbria, and then looking for themes within those responses.

Its aim has been to bring to light unexpected insights, and to discover the right questions to ask, rather than asking for yes/no answers on pre defined topics. Secret Life tries to open a channel in which the local authority can listen to what it might not otherwise have heard. Almost all of the messages have been interesting memories or thoughtful personal observations, and the standard of responses shows a high level of engagement by participants with the Secret Life of Cumbria.

As consultation, Secret Life of Cumbria has not been a closed, one-to-one relationship between the participants and the local authority, in which the collected responses are only seen by the council and then disappear into the archives. It is an open, many-to-many, public relationship in which people in Cumbria can share what they care about with each other, enabled by the council. But more than just a consultation tool, it is a form of participation in the arts in itself, whether that is through answering a question reflectively or reading the story on the Secret Life of Cumbria web site.

Commissioned by folly, a leading digital arts organisation, Secret Life of Cumbria has been funded by Cumbria County Council, and developed by Blink, a not-for-profit creative technology research organisation.