How re-imagining online collections led us to transforming the way we work
An update on NEO Collections by Marleen Grasse (Project Coordinator) and Abhay Adhikari (Digital Partner) who’ve been working closely with three museums to design and run experiments over the past year.
How it started…
Marleen: Last year, our project leads Antje Schmidt, Karin Glasemann and Etta Grotrian shared their inspirations and experiences that led to the NEO Collections project. We began by defining our guiding principles: open access, emphasis on the user and an explorative approach towards digital museum collections (this is what the acronym NEO stands for in German). More than a year into the project we’d like to share some insights into our process and the steps we took so far.
Abhay: Let’s go back to how it all began. The beauty of NEO is that it’s a blank canvas. Starting with a blank canvas sounds fantastic, but as everyone who has ever attempted to do so knows, it can be intimidating. The thing we don’t anticipate when we start from scratch is the choices we will have to make. And as we begin to parse through these choices, we create a sprawling list of options that can be paralyzing. We believe this mess is a good thing as it will help us create meaningful and relevant outcomes. To create structure we decided to work in cycles of three to six months. We frame these cycles as experiments. This takes away the pressure of achieving conventionally successful outcomes. The purpose of a cycle is to help us systematically work through barriers to progress.
Marleen: All three institutions began their first cycle with workshops on user centred design, prototyping and usability. This helped demystify buzzwords and understand that there’s no need in planning and executing new developments carefully until we reach perfection, but that testing and small iterations take us further more quickly and with a lot less effort. And of course these workshops also had an impact on the team building process.
Team: opt-in or out
Abhay: I’m proud of the team-building process we’ve followed. Rather than mandate participation we made it voluntary. Therefore, colleagues in the three institutions could opt-in or out after a cycle. Whilst that sounds like a logistical nightmare, it ensured the process was driven by genuine interests. As a result there is a high level of enthusiasm and participation.
Marleen: True. This way of working has shaped the dynamic and rhythm of a cycle: successive steps are co-produced by colleagues. We can really build on the individual and interdisciplinary competencies of the colleagues who are involved. And since we are a collaboration of three museums the variety of skills and backgrounds is even more diverse.
Abhay: It seemed that each institution was taking a different approach. Would these insights add up? We decided to trust the process and work under the belief that nothing is wasted. Skills, experiences and results would be transferable across all museums, and hopefully across the sector.
Marleen: We want to learn from each other! And all approaches are different takes on the question, how we can further develop the digital collections according to the needs of our users.
But who are our users?
Marleen: At the Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe Hamburg we started to have conversations with different people such as writers, designers, artists, teachers, data scientists and other professionals who are heavy users of museums’ digital collections. It was very rewarding for us to see how the objects are used in so many different ways and how different the needs are. During these relaxed conversations many ideas for prototypes came up — how to connect knowledge, how to bring in playful approaches and different voices, how to make information relatable and more. We noticed that we want to do some groundwork on data discovery and clarify some technical challenges first, so we’ve taken some of these ideas into further conversations within our think tank of international experts.
The Nationalmuseum Sweden took a deep dive into impact and user research. The study proved some assumptions we already had before and helped to move forward with more focus. It showed that people want more information, but they don’t want to read more. They want to connect emotionally and thus we want to give the Visitor Guide App, which is a great entry to explore the galleries of the Nationalmuseum, a more human approach by adding stories from museum staff. We are conducting workshops on storytelling to learn how to create a compelling emotional hook without compromising accuracy.
And at the Übersee-Museum Bremen we began conversations with critical friends from the Pacific Islands. What is the difference between being interested in and condescending about different cultures? How do people from different cultures frame concepts that we are so familiar with? These meetings helped us define three questions for the Digital Residencies. Launched in August, they were opened to creative practitioners globally to respond to these ideas. We are excited to see how these ideas will turn into prototypes.
Abhay: Like this we believe we have started to develop a couple of formats for cultural institutions to have open and friendly conversations. Whilst that might sound like a trivial issue, it was an incredibly important step for our colleagues — to turn up and have a chat without the pressure of finding a solution. This has helped us launch public initiatives such as the Digital Residencies by the Übersee-Museum.
Marleen: We are continuously asking ourselves: Are we moving fast enough? But we all agree that NEO Collections is not another project on developing the next shiny digital application, but about transforming the way we work together.
How it’s going…
As this update shows, there has been a lot going on. In the coming months we hope to share process notes, updates from the core team and blog posts from our global network of collaborators as well as friends of the project. We want to open this blog up to create a platform for discussion on digital museum collections, the way we work and collaborate.
If you have any questions, please get in touch!
NEO Collections is funded by the Digital Culture Programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
