Universe Gallery — An Approach to the Purest Kind of Exploration
About the possibilities to introduce art to the digital world
This article is about rethinking the digital experience of consuming and exploring art. Human beings are different and have different approaches to consume information. We identified curiosity as the key to get attention, therefore we analyzed behaviors and conceptualized a circular system to always keep up the user’s curiosity. Based on our research and studies we prototyped a user interface for exploring artworks of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to give an example of our thoughts and results.
Introduce museums to the digital world
Since museums exist curators are developing different strategies to create inviting and educational experiences. Compared to the physical experiences digital experiences in the art-scene often are monotonous and uncompelling. The opportunities of the digital channels are poorly used and potential stakeholders are lost.
Within an interdisciplinary project in the spring of 2018, we further explored the question of how digital archives can be experienced in engaging and innovative interfaces.
Challenges and existing approaches
During this project, we had the opportunity to meet curators from different European galleries. This brief immersion gave us great insights into the current museum-scene and also helped us to understand, why it is so difficult to build an emotional construct of understanding and feeling art in the digital space. We learned with which attention to detail curators shape every aspect within and around the museum, and how many rules and standards they have to respect to ensure quality and consistency. The curator’s way of working is very structured and disciplined and requires a massive set of knowledge, understanding, and creativity. Besides the physical museum-world, we analyzed existing digital experiences including the online presence of museums like the Berlinische Gallery or the https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en, but also more creative approaches such as products from the Google Arts & Culture project, some of their experiments, Tyne and Wear Museum Archives or the Urban Complexity Lab. Existing digital art-spaces are often unintuitive or flat. A lot of interfaces to explore art tend to be confusing and overwhelming because they often lack a good concept for being used. This is because many of these concepts were developed with the focus of communicating the existence of the used data or specific technological potentials. But most of them have not been created to drive interest and understanding to immerse viewers into the experience of art.
Taking all of this into consideration we challenged ourselves to create a concept for a tool, that is inviting, curiosity arising but also analytically with a deep aspiration of correctness and understanding. A tool, a beginner as well as a professional could use, offering ways to explore or to specifically search.
How can we create experiences that educate and inspire?
To understand something new, one naturally combines past and currently acquired knowledge. One changes perspectives to inspect, analyze or explore different details or dimensions. Thus we wanted to convey this natural and intuitive behavior into the digital context. To arise curiosity, users need to be able to compare and set in contrast when exploring art.
Think of a newborn or child that explores its world.
Think of a newborn or child that explores its world. It always changes perspectives in many different ways; it moves, experiments and uses different senses to passively analyze and get to know its surrounding. Keeping up curiosity is always about getting new information, contextualize this with known or other information and change the perspective to again gain new information. All of that based on and enhanced by emotions.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
Plutarch
Our goal for this collaborative project was to create concepts that would inspire curators, museums and its visitors to expect more when thinking about museums on the web. The museum-world on the web has huge opportunities for visitors to participate in an exchange, and after all, having enriching experiences that make them grow and spread understanding to the world. We want web experience to be meaningful by unfolding the advantages of digital potentials.
Best thing that can happen is people saying ‘I love this because it is just meaningful to me’
Chris Michaels, Digital Director of the London National Gallery
Visualize the mass
As mentioned above, we want to engage people through their own curiosity. At each step, we try to encourage users by taking new perspectives and contextualizing those. We think it is important to always keep the ensemble in mind. Nothing exists unaffected or only by itself. Everything has a surrounding and necessarily to be contextualized with it, otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to classify or understand it. Our first approach, therefore, was to display the whole dataset at once. We visualize every single object within the whole mass. We cluster those by specific chosen parameters to understand their surroundings and situation.
Nothing exists unaffected or only by itself.
Freedom to move and active interaction and influencing options is our second approach. The user should be free from limited or restricted feelings during the whole experience. An infinite zooming into and out of the dataset and every object defines the focus and dimension of contextualization. Users can influence the point of view at each step of dimension. It is important to make sure every interaction can be made consciously! The tool should enable users in achieving perspective changing or exploring as much as possible.
Provide more detailed information
At one point users want to get to know more about a specific object. In museums, this is often solved through audio guides where one can consume both at once, the artwork and the additional information about it.
Approaching more senses than just the visual in the web is uncommon and risky. You don’t know the setup or surrounding of the user. Especially for such important information, we decided to use another way to provide multiple channels of information. We developed an interaction for slight, intuitive and fast-changing the view through expanding the content over the boundaries of the screen. This way the user should always be focussed while looking at both artwork or its details. Moving the cursor, as the digital extension of the user’s eyes, simply moves the view to make the desired information available.
New perspectives to experience
Probably the most important part of our concept is that users should always be able to take new perspectives and set those into context. This is what we understand as experience. When a topic is truly catching our interest we want to get as many different perspectives as possible. We want to explore new relations and gain new knowledge about this specific topic. And this is what we want to arouse in users while interacting with our tool. We developed a concept that automatically generates those relations, those perspective changes. The user is able to start a new perspective, depending on the currently chosen object. Create a whole universe around this object and at the same time be able to influence all parameters in order to decide what the focus of the universe should be. This is a visualization of what already happens in human beings while learning new things. We called this ‘Gravity Field’. This gravity is built on similarity. The more similar objects are, depending on the set parameter, the closer they are displayed. Those parameters, for example, are the content of the images, single objects, colors, shapes, metadata like year, artist or size, or even just manually or in other ways set tags. The current object is the center of the universe and this object sets the fundament of parameters and influencing factors.
Transparency evokes trust
At various points, users want to get more detailed information. Transparency and information are one of the most important and sensitive topics in our concept. We need to make sure, our visualizations are trustworthy. Therefore users can get information about all processes, all paths, depth and decisions they made to always jump back and create another branch from a specifically chosen point. We additionally provide information about how algorithms make decisions, for example how the gravity field of an object gets influenced but without any judging. Users here can decide which parameters currently shall influence the gravity field and can always inspect the influences of each factor.
Communicate different hermeneutic pre-suppositions
Hermeneutic pre-suppositions, also known as the knowledge and experiences that shapes and influences every human being in a different way. Human beings live different lives and get different educations, friends, parents… and each of these factors causes a unique person with a specific hermeneutic pre-supposition.
One good way to get new perspectives is to communicate about it. Each person has its own hermeneutic presuppositions and therefore a different perspective and version of the view. Exchanging those different presuppositions can be very helpful to understand more aspects of the inspected object or topic. Thus we created a communication sidebar which is always visible and focuses on the specific view without disturbing the rest of the experience. Users can communicate about specific objects and even about specific details of the textual additional information or visual details of the object itself. Insofar users can link comments, questions or even other objects to whatever is needed. Other users can then make references to those comments. This is how the asynchronous communication has evolved into a new gorgeous level where human needs and behaviors define the way and dimension of communication. This offers a massive potential to learn, discuss and reshape users perception of art by communicating with each other.
Enable users to participate, communicate and interact in different ways.
Another participatory need we discovered is to collect objects on your own. People like to collect and define categories by themselves. But to offer a nearly complete collection within this self-defined category is manually almost impossible. Unfortunately, the biggest value of such collections underlays completeness and trustworthiness which we cannot guarantee. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, offers options to create such user-driven collections, called ‘Rijksstudios’. Here users created a huge amount of those. The Rijksmuseum has currently 643,786 works of art and 431,320 Rijksstudios which is paradoxical. Collections are a great way to create better accessibility and define the different point of views. But when you give users the freedom to create public collections without streamlining, you often would end up with a tremendous amount of unfinished compilations, making categorization obsolete. That is why we decided not to focus on collections but to enable users to participate, communicate and interact in different ways.
Interact and communicate with professionals
By offering workspaces where curators can generate pages to inform about further relations and anecdotes, additional information can be communicated. Those workspaces can be edited by users but to keep up trustworthiness, the edited workspaces then need to get evaluated and curated. Workspaces can easily be acquired over a separate but linked page.
Search, filter, and tag
According to our research about different hermeneutic presuppositions of users and human beings in general, the purposes and the usage of our tool can differ a lot. And this is good. Some people tend to freely explore and randomly inspect content, while others want a more organized experience. To provide both systems, we prototyped an intelligent filter system which analyzes metadata of all objects and recognizes relations between single data tags. This allows us to propose specific tags and belongings depending on already chosen parameters. To put it plainly, users can either directly search for specific words or select default offered tags. The intelligent tags are constantly recalculated to offer highly relating topics at all times. To get even higher accessibility and a more advanced and intuitive interaction, we ideated a completely new advanced tag system. Each offered tag represents a list of tags within the same category, let’s say the specific color “blue” within the “color” tag. Now users can either select the offered tag or choose within this category another one or even specify through interaction options like sliders. This additional kind of tags we called “Fluid-Tags”. These tags specify a specific range, not just a single digit or word. Fluid-Tags can be used for a range of time, defining a rough area on a map, defining ranges of colors or other multidimensional factors.
This enables us to combine the simplicity of standard tags and the productivity and better performance of nested, categorized and our newly ideated fluid tags. Additionally, another algorithm categorizes the search parameters into groups of words and sentiments to cover synonyms and similar meanings, which is of advantage when the parameters or additional textual information use another spelling or writing style. Human beings are different and we want to handle different behaviors, purposes, and hermeneutic presuppositions to achieve a great user experience.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
For a better understanding and to communicate our concept, we created a prototype based on the archive of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
About this project
Our ambition for this project was to inspire to think beyond the horizon of the current situation of how to represent and communicate museums. Within a collaborative course between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam (FHP), we explored the question on how digital archives can be experienced in more engaging and innovative ways. We analyzed the current situation and rethought it with focus on human beings and their behavior, needs and intuitive interaction to op an even better experience. The goal was to prototype a digital tool for exploring museums and art intuitively, valuable and with the approach to provoke curiosity. This is just a concept and no system ready for production. To create a working and valuable product out of this more analysis with potential users and experts would be needed. Assumptions on the technological feasibility of our concepts derived from comparable approaches, technical papers on the performant clustering of datasets, chat with people from our development cycles and our limited personal coding experience.
Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson
Who we are
We are Interface-Design students at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany. Our ambition is always to create valuable and inspiring work to encourage rethinking and open up to new and unknown methods and concepts. We want to create a more aware, intuitive and inspiring level for human interactions.
Many different of our projects continuously shaped our focus on how to ease all our lives. On the other hand, those also showed what kind of support makes the user be paralyzed and unaware. Therefore our aim is to always encourage interaction and communication in every part of life.
@Julian: julian.wohlleber@gmail.com
@Paul: medium@paulklinski.de
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