This article is part of a series of Design Retrospectives on the prototypes commissioned by Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab as part of Activating Smithsonian Open Access. It was written by Zander Brimijoin, Creative Director and Partner at Red Paper Heart. Experience the Art Clock through your web browser, and help source times of your own!...

This article was written as part of a series of Design Retrospectives on the prototypes commissioned by Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab for the Activating Smithsonian Open Access Challenge. It was co-authored by the ButtARfly team: Jonathan Lee, Project Lead and Animation Programmer; Rianne Trujillo, Web Developer; Lauren Addario, Audio Advisor and Content Developer; Miriam Langer,...

This article was written by educator and experience designer, Caitlin Krause as part of a series of Design Retrospectives on the prototypes commissioned by Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab for the Activating Smithsonian Open Access Challenge. When ScienceVR co-founders Yen-Ling Kuo, Jackie Lee, and I began to approach the design process for the Activating Smithsonian Open...

This article  was written by Jono Brandel, new media artist and team lead for Writing with Open Access. It is the first in a series of Design Retrospectives on the prototypes commissioned by Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab as part of Activating Smithsonian Open Access in Spring of 2021.  Introduction It was a series of interviews...

Activating Smithsonian Open Access (ASOA) was born from a conversation that took place in June of 2020, while much of the world was locked down. Millions of jobs evaporated overnight, and those working in the creative and gig economies watched incomes, projects, and years of hard-won programmatic gains in the arts and humanities vanish without...

Building on the work presented in Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience, Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab will offer a workshop series this fall 2021 for two separate cohorts of 20 museum practitioners and leaders across visitor experience-related disciplines who are currently working on transformative museum experience projects.  The definition of a transformative museum experience...

Art Clock is the only gallery that uses artwork to tell time. The gallery is created by users scouring the Smithsonian Open Access catalog for art that could be interpreted as an analog clock face. Our goal is to use collective brain power to find and display a uniquely appropriate image for every minute of...

Art Echo is a web-based virtual reality experience that reveals the acoustic attributes of 3D objects in the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections while moving through periods of the history of Earth and some of its inhabitants. In this virtual gallery people can experience the objects and their stories through imagery, sound, and simulated echolocation based...

ButtARfly brings butterflies from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections to life on your screen. Browse and learn about butterfly species, add them to your virtual shadow box, and release them into an augmented reality experience for desktop and mobile. In addition to its visual elements, ButtARfly offers a sound signature for each butterfly specimen turning...

Casting Memories confronts the impact and legacy of looted art and white supremacy in museums through the perspective and intimate experience of a Nigerian artist / technologist / scammer learning about their stolen history and identity through the Benin Bronzes in the Smithsonian collections. To illustrate how creativity can be used to transform, reclaim and...

Doorways into Open Access is an augmented reality experience that transports audiences back a century to Paris of “La Belle Epoque,” a golden era that began in the early 1870s and lasted through the beginning of WWI in 1914. Downloading the app opens a virtual portal to 1912, inviting travelers to learn about artifacts of...

Treasure Hunt: Space Mission is a multiplayer treasure hunt game that offers players an interactive, social learning experience utilizing artifacts from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections. Players discover, authenticate, and collect digital artifacts to score points and win the game, while learning from each other in the process. ABOUT THE TEAM: ScienceVR creates a delightful...

Thanks to Writing with Open Access, you can explore the Smithsonian’s vast Open Access collections guided by your thoughts. Write something. Wait a moment, and a collage of related images will appear. Whether for creative inspiration, scholarly research, or to tackle writer’s block, this novel, web-based interface helps generate new ideas, and supports ten languages....

A note: This article was co-written by Angela Perrone, Katherine Miller, and Rachel Ginsberg before the events of the past few weeks, in a world that feels yet again very different. Rather than rewriting, we’ve decided to publish as is. We stand in solidarity with those organizing against institutionalized racism and discrimination in all forms,...

When we first began to build out our plans for the Interaction Lab, we were already certain public programs would play a big role in our work. We conceived of our public programs to convene a variety of audiences for shared learning, exploration, and discussion on topics related to our work reimagining the visitor experience...