A Museum That Talks to its Visitors

Redefining the traditional notion of "kiosk" in a dedicated gallery-education space with a platform for interviews, photos, bios, forums, tagging, and community contributions.

Making Collections Accessible

Like most museums its size, ICA Boston has archive upon archive of amazing and unique art, but a limited amount of physical space.

They were looking for a way to make their collections easily accessible while simultaneously fostering a dialogue between the museum, its artists, and its visitors.

Rich Media, Silent Space

Conceived as a hybrid between an exhibition gallery and an interactive multi-media resource for learning, the museum’s Mediatheque redefines the role of an on-site technology-based educational facility.

Our task was to design a kiosk-based application – or as the ICA called it, a "conversation interface" – that turned the Mediatheque into a place for visitors to interact both with the art and with each other without compromising its setting as an intimate place for contemplation.

Engage with Others on the Question of “What is Art?”

The solution we came up with was artistic in its simplicity: a collection of kiosks that complemented ICA’s contemporary art by enhancing it with contemporary technology. 

People browsed the galleries and engaged with the museum community on the question of “What is Art?” by communicating directly through the artwork. The image tagging system allowed them to exchange thoughts, descriptions, and interpretations of everything in the collection. The community-generated library of over 10,000 terms and descriptors became a permanent record of the documentation of each work in exhibitions. 

Visitors wrote freely about the art they were seeing through polling features and theme months prompting discussion. Past questions included "What is your favorite feature of our new building," and "Who do you think should win the James and Audrey Foster Prize?" 

Teen bloggers posed questions about architectural features of the building and artwork in the galleries and were answered by curators and registrars. 

The "What Makes it Art?" section – a cross between a chat and a blog – fostered dialogue among visitors within the museum; visitors using it anonymously or overtly state reasons for liking or disliking art on view. 

Net.art, browser-based artworks and teen videos developed in the on-site Digital Studio were on view, and visitors browsed a curated archive of single-channel video works.