Something for us to avoid…
Category Archives: Lightbox Gallery
Brainstorming and inspiring asynchronously (Museums Team)
Advancing a common goal while acknowledging competing demands on team members’ time is a fundamental challenge all the DPSI projects face. One tool the Lightbox team is making use of is a tumblr for sharing links, images, essays, and ideas impinging on the work of designing a flexible, media-rich, curatorially-sensitive program for bringing data to life in the new Harvard Art Museum. We’re finding the tumblr especially useful for assembling a kind of mood book or pinboard for the project. In this early phase, the collection of posts clusters around charismatic precedents, demos of candidate display technologies, and links to essays that inform our approach as designers of a curatorial invention in art history. As the project matures, we’ll continue to document our own process there as well. The tumblr should not only facilitate our group’s work, however, but foster connections beyond the group as well—so if the flavor of posts there inspires a connection in your thinking, please do comment, link, and be in touch!
From the DPSI Launch Event –
Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles, mentors of the Lightbox at Harvard Art Museums team, outline the suite of possibilities and potential for designing a programmable space in the Harvard Art Museums when they reopen in Fall 2014.
Museum Team – Data Experience
The Museum team met on Monday night to start brainstorming for the “lightbox gallery” in the Harvard Art Museum’s new Renzo Piano-designed wing connected to the Fogg building. We were joined by Jeff Steward, the museum’s director of emerging technology, who shared with us visualizations of page-view data for object-record pages at the museums’ web site. This fly-through shows the forests and deserts of page-views, offering an intuitive sense of the degrees of interest people take in objects in the museum. It’s an example of one kind of evocative data experience we want to experiment with in the lightbox gallery.