#EuropeanaInspires - Meet design projects from LUCA, School of Arts, Brussels

This is a guest blog post by Nathalie Kronal from LUCA (School of Arts, Brussels).

New technological changes have emerged in rapid succession, blurring the distinctions between physical and digital world, and forming new creative and digital communities as a result. We can harness this change to bring our shared European cultural heritage closer to the public.

Because Europeana has been inspiring creatives and developers to reuse their openly licensed content in innovative ways, our school, LUCA (School of Arts, Brussels) has encouraged students to think of possible reinterpretations and reuses of Europeana content.

The assignment

During the second semester of the 2016-2017 school year, second-year bachelor's students of Graphic Design were asked to remodel a part of the Europeana collection into an interactive and immersive digital experience that was intuitive and pleasant to use. The goals of the assignment were to create new insights, reveal connections that were invisible before and let users engage more deeply with the content.

The students started the assignment by analysing the content provided on the platform and looking for items that inspired them. They quickly began to see opportunities in the extensive collection and ideas began to grow. We encouraged our students to experiment continuously and start with rapid prototyping early in the process. For about twelve weeks our students immersed themselves in design research and development: user flows, paper and dynamic prototyping, functional and graphic design and user testing.

The results are quite diverse, from useful tools in the form of an app or website, to playful installations where the user needs to move around to discover the collection. Some exciting projects came out of this and we selected three student projects we’d like to share with the Europeana community - see below.

The projects

ARTO by Nabil El Hajjouti

ARTO is an app that allows users to explore a part of the Europeana collection by playing an association game. The goal of the game is to match random given popular film quotes with paintings available on Europeana.

Colour Meets Sound by Matti Verbanck

Colour Meets Sound is a web tool that makes the colors from Europeana Fashion objects accessible to people with color blindness. This is possible by connecting color frequencies to sound frequencies.

A Walk Through History by Joëlle Tan

A Walk through History [simulation] from Joëlle Tan on Vimeo.

A Walk Through History is an indoor installation where visitors are able to navigate through a selection of paintings - from the Europeana database - whilst moving around in the space. The installation includes two connected components: a wall projection and a painted grid on the floor.