Museum and the web

Museum and the web

Lukas and Kars were in San Diego last week to attend the Museums and the Web conference, a gathering of museum geeks from all over the world.

Exactly the place we want to be, considering we count the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the National Architecture Institute (NAi) amongst our clients.

Our goal while visiting was simple: to underline how this mix of creative, cultural and technical people is a breeding ground for new ideas. To this end, we set up a hackathon and invited several of our partners to join us.

Together with the Stedelijk Museum, our design partner Fabrique opened the hackathon with a workshop in which 15 attendees conducted a brainstorm focused on exploring the possibilities of using museum APIs. By the end of the session we had put three ideas on paper and were getting pretty excited about building them.

For the next four days, we spent every spare hour working on turning these ideas into reality and even ended up inventing a fourth project. Using rapid prototyping we were able to quickly iterate on these ideas and even launch a few of them! The results (and progress) are viewable at http://mwhackathon.com, and we launched two projects separately that you can take a look at:

  • Museum Or Not — is this image from a museum or just a randomly chosen image from the web?
  • Museumify — What would your portrait look like if it were hanging in a museum?

Hope you like them!