Here yee, here yee. We announceth today we are shutting down our art exhibition guide. 

Why? Well, it’s just not being used enough. Most of the reasons for this have been covered in an earlier blog post. While the art exhibition guide will halt, we are continuing research and work in the cultural sector. It’s not easy to admit failure, but in the case of the art guide, while it seemed like a timely and useful service, assumptions on its eventual use and audience uptake were far short of expectations. Was it worth building? Hell yeah. We learned how to build and deploy a platform for museums. We also got to meet many wonderful people working within the cultural sector.

Reflecting on our experience, Tijs and I have have toned some new muscles which included gaining far greater insight into how participation works in museums (both on and offline). We feel that while this is definitive obituary for our art guide, it’s a rebirth (not bathtub-centric holotropic breathing techniques) of what we can do and mean for the cultural sector as a technology and design partner. 

Maybe with more time & resources we could have etched out enough of a user base to support a small business around the online art guide concept. But this is a small market with a really diverse and not always easy to reach audience. We do still believe there’s lots of opportunity for interesting projects that bring new models of interaction, powered by online networks and tools, into the venue. And we’ll discuss some of our ideas on that in a later blog post.

You might ask what you then can expect from our site, now we are closing down the art exhibition guide? Not your nearest exhibitions i’m afraid. We will stick around to design and build on/off-line experiments though. The exact shape of that particular organization will unfold over the coming months.

Up next: Margita van Vugt shares some of the research results from her internship at NARB which she is currently finalizing…

Next week: We will be sharing what we can from NARB starting with a data release of cultural locations under a CC zero license.  We will also write a small how-to on building your own exhibition guide service and more…