A comparative study of graph structures, traversability movement and exhibition strategy in museums during Covid-19

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has posed challenges in relation to how buildings re-open to use, particularly buildings attracting large numbers of visitors, such as museums and galleries. As these institutions started to reopen across the UK and internationally, a number of social distance measures were adopted in order to safely bring people into their premises and access their collections. Building on Bill Hillier's theorical model of spatial types and spatial structures (2019), we explore the spatial-curatorial changes implicated in the re-opening of five British museums (The National Gallery, The Tate Britain, Tate Modern, British Museum and The Wallace Collection in London) and one American museum (The MoMA, New York). Our purpose is not to provide practical solutions, but to set the search for spatial approaches to the reopening of museums within a theory of spatial structure in space syntax and inform the design future of public buildings. We present a model of a three-layered spatial system, interfacing the global and local structure of these buildings. We argue that the presence of intersecting cycles of movement in spatial layouts determines their capability for adapting to the one-way routes imposed by the pandemic. The spatial organisation of the display is a second factor influencing the reopening strategies, either limiting or optimising available spatial sequences to meet curatorial criteria. © 2022 Proceedings 13th International Space Syntax Symposium, SSS 2022. All rights reserved.

Transformation of Plants into Polka Dot Arts: Kusama Yayoi as an Inspiration for Deep Learning

Museums and galleries are places that stimulate the imagination and creativity of people. However, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, many museums have been forced to close. As a result, more visitors have had to start visiting online exhibitions. Under this trend, the quality of the online exhibition experience is facing unprecedented challenges, and visitors need to be provided with a high-quality online experience. With the rapid development of emerging technologies, museums and galleries have started to use technology to create “digitalization” experiences, such as 3D virtual exhibitions and VR interactive experiences. The current online exhibition format focuses more on improving the visitor’s experience of viewing and browsing works and related information and less on how visitors create their artworks. In order to remedy the experience of visitors actively creating artworks, this study uses Yayoi Kusama’s works as a case study to help form an utterly interactive process between visitors and artworks. We propose a Polka Dot Arts Transfer Network (PDAT-net), mixing realistic-looking and Polka Dot Art-style reference images. The output image looks like an actual natural image “drawn” in the polka dot art style. The PDAT-net is trained to compose an image in the style of Polka Dot Arts, based on neural style transfer. Convolutional networks implemented the training. Plant images performed the final test. The results showed that the generated polka dot images have similar styles to the style images, proving that our PDAT-network has good transfer performance of Polka Dot Arts. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Coronavirus Pandemic as an Opportunity for Pedagogical Innovation. Research of Didactic Resources of Art Museums and Galleries

Our paper deals with online educational resources created by art museums and galleries of the Czech Republic in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. This paper is a partial outcome of a research project currently conducted by the authors at the Palacky University Olomouc in the Czech Republic. The primary focus of the research is to analyse online accessible digital educa-tional resources of educational departments of art museums and galleries, the ways of their presentation to the public, and the way they can be used by art educators for distance teaching of art education not only in the time of coronavirus. As part of our research, we will create a set of case studies, on the basis of which a typology of online educational resources will be formulated. This paper presents the up-to-date results of the research as well as analyses and gives examples of three categories of online educational resources, namely motivational chal-lenges, educational tutorials, and interactive websites.

Data-inspired co-design for museum and gallery visitor experiences

The capture and analysis of diverse data is widely recognized as being vital to the design of new products and services across the digital economy. We focus on its use to inspire the co-design of visitor experiences in museums as a distinctive case that reveals opportunities and challenges for the use of personal data. We present a portfolio of data-inspired visiting experiences that emerged from a 3-year Research Through Design process. These include the overlay of virtual models on physical exhibits, a smartphone app for creating personalized tours as gifts, visualizations of emotional responses to exhibits, and the data-driven use of ideation cards. We reflect across our portfolio to articulate the diverse ways in which data can inspire design through the use of ambiguity, visualization, and inter-personalization;how data inspire co-design through the process of co-ideation, co-creation, and co-interpretation;and how its use must negotiate the challenges of privacy, ownership, and transparency. By adopting a human perspective on data, we are able to chart out the complex and rich information that can inform design activities and contribute to datasets that can drive creativity support systems.