The GIFT project

The team behind the three-year project achieved their goal of helping cultural heritage institutions with their digital transformation through supporting them in the challenges involved in using new technology. For this, the project developed several tools and methods of working to help museums enhance the visitor experience in their online platforms and physical spaces. 

GIFT was a European project funded under the Horizon2020 research and innovation programme. 

 GIFT app test at Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton - Charlie Johnson, 2018, England, CC-BY-SA

The GIFT Box

The GIFT Box was a set of free, open-source tools that provides resources to help museums and other cultural heritage institutions design, plan and implement enhanced visitor experiences. These resources were available online and supported until December 2021. 

About the GIFT Box

A number of design and planning tools helped cultural heritage organisations to generate, strengthen and test new ideas for digital experiences. They were developed with and for museums as a way to help prioritise ideation in early phases of design work. 

1. 'VisitorBox Ideation Cards' was a printable card game that helps generate new ideas for digital experiences. 

2. 'ASAP Map' encouraged cultural heritage institutions to develop a shared understanding of their ideas. 

3. 'Experiment Planner' helped cultural heritage institutions to plan ways to test their idea and map out a clear plan to implement it.

4.  'Cardographer' was a digital platform that enables cultural heritage institutions to capture physical card-based design ideas and analyse trends, issues and opportunities.

5.  'Scenarios' allowed cultural heritage institutions to use role-playing to generate a common understanding of a particular theoretical concept related to their design idea.

 GIFT app test at Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton - Charlie Johnson, 2018, England, CC-BY-SA

Open source digital tools were designed in partnership with leading museums to give other cultural institutions the inspiration to create more personal experiences with their collection, combining the digital and physical. These included: 

1. The 'Gift App' allowed visitors to use their smartphone to create a digital gift for someone they care about.

2. 'Artcodes' were customisable and scannable markers that let cultural heritage institutions blend their physical exhibition with digital content.

3. 'Never Let Me Go' allowed two visitors to co-create and co-curate each others’ encounter with their collection. 

4. 'One Minute' used image recognition to offer visitors a short story that encourages them to reflect on and engage with an institution's content.

5. 'Gift Wrapper' was an app which visitors could download to make a museum gift more personal by adding a link to digital content such as music, photos or videos. 

6. 'ScannerBox' enabled cultural heritage institutions to create interactive 3D models of objects in their collection or contributed by visitors. 

7. 'Emotion Mapper' allowed cultural heritage institutions to gather input about visitors’ emotions and visualise their responses. 

8. 'VRtefacts' put visitors into a Virtual Reality experience where they could explore and touch 3D models of museum objects and share stories about them. 

9. 'Gift Viz' is a workflow that helped visitors visualise the data captured from gifting experiences.

 GIFT app test at Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton - Charlie Johnson, 2018, England, CC-BY-SA

Working with 10 prominent museums from Europe and the US, the GIFT team developed a number of practical ways of working to help cultural heritage institutions with experience design and organisational change to help them improve work practices to excel digitally.

Find out more

Read more about the GIFT project on Europeana Pro news. 

The GIFT conference was part of Europeana Anual Event 2019. You can watch the conference on our Youtube channel.

 GIFT app test at Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton - Charlie Johnson, 2018, England, CC-BY-SA