Beyond digital content

Abstract

Digitization, the word itself sounds almost vulgar in this day and age. It is impossible to imagine our daily life without the digital tools we use. We work in the cloud, communicate on-line, stream our media and even find our life partner on an app.

Contemporary artists were among the first to embrace digital innovation as a tool to enhance their work. Yet contemporary art museums appear to need more convincing. Many fear the devaluation of the physical experience of art by investing in the digital.

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) had recently been extending their efforts in digital content. This project comes at a point where the MAC is looking at the future of digital content in the museum.

In order to get new vision on this matter the designer was immersed in the museum for a period of 8 months. The approach to get to a new sustainable digital strategy was based in collaboration and creative discussion.

One of the common pitfalls in digital innovation is the influence of the traditional institutional structure on the final product. At the MAC,the devision in departments shines through in the digital initiatives. In order to move forward in digital content it is important to create the right environment to innovate. In this environment the values of design thinking should be implemented.

Well executed digital innovation in a museum has the potential to play a role in the larger scope. The challenge lays in utilizing digital tools to approach upcoming challenges in the museums path. This opposes a grant based approach to digital projects. In the case of the MAC there is a large scale remodeling (transformation) coming up. The second half of this report includes a concept design that arms the MAC in this time of change.

This concept uses the digital content that was created by the MAC in the past years and places it on a new stage. Combining digital content in a physical platform will increase the reach focusing on the upcoming period of transformation. The new content system re-imagines the way we interact with digital museum content and makes creating links that increase the value of the information easy and logical.

The project introduces solutions for the MAC specifically as well as establishing an approach that has the potential to innovate digital content in the contemporary art world as a whole.