Case Study 7: MoMA WIFI and Smarthistory

MoMA WIFI is an application developed and produced by Lotte Meijer from STUDIO LOTTE MEIJER.

Lotte: “MoMA WiFi is a free WiFi network in the entire museum, and a website especially made for wifi-enabled-devices. Through MoMA Wifi, visitors can listen to MoMA’s audio tours with their own iPhone, iPodTouch etc.

The website (designed for the iphone) offers multiple ways for visitors to find the audio (as opposed to standard multimediatour devices). You can browse by floor, tour, or search by artwork number, and the website offers all available audio stops (For adults, teens, kids or visual descriptions) once an artwork is found.

MoMA WiFi was the first wifi-based audiotour in the world that spanned an entire museum, and offered a tour of its permanent collection and special exhibitions.

MoMA WiFi was developed when I worked at MoMA’s Digital Media department.
I was responsible for the concept (with Spencer Kiser), design (with great feedback from Shannon Darrough) and css-development. The back-end was developed by John Halderman.

Much thanks to Eleonore Hugendubel, Jakob Schillinger, Carmen Hermo, Nadine Katkhouda, Chiara Bernasconi, Wan Soo Kim, Bonnie Lee and Ingrid Chou for translations into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin and Japanese.”

This is a simulation: www.moma.org/wifi

Smarthistory

Lotte Meijer: “Smarthistory is an online multimedia art history ‘web-book’ — developed by NY art historians and professors Steven Zucker en Beth Harris as an enhancement (or even replacement) of the traditional static art history text book. The website discusses over 200 of the high points of Western art history from antiquity until today, in text, audio, and more than 150 videos.

The website is aimed at both goal-oriented and casual users, by allowing a multitude of ways to find the content. With the drop down navigation at the top: one can quickly search by period, style or artist name, or browse through thumbnails of the artworks in the image browser on every page.

On the artwork pages, the text and video’s are joined by a map that quickly places the artwork in a time and place; links to other interesting websites, and photos of the artwork that were contributed to Smarthistory’s flickr pool.

I was responsible for the information architecture, interaction design and project management for the new and strongly updated version of smarthistory.org. In collaboration with designer Mickey Mayo en developer Dragan Nikolic.

Smarthistory won the 2009 Webby Award in the Education category.”