DOORS Reflections
I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in both phases of the Ars Electronica/ECSite DOORS Museum Incubator programme over the last 12 months and as it now comes to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on everything that we have achieved.
DOORS brought together 20 small museums across Europe to experience training from incredible heritage and digital leaders as well as funding our own individual innovation projects. It was fantastic to bridge the geographical divide, with partners from Finland to Israel taking place. There is something reassuring to hear that the same problems we have as small museums in Cornwall, were often echoed in Slovakia or Estonia! The projects each museum presented were very inspiring as well, with projects featuring augmented reality apps and innovative 3-d digitization taking place as just 2 examples, really underlined that small museums can not only create and run these innovations but that this is a fantastic place for technology to thrive and have a massive impact.
A highlight for me was taking part in an in-depth workshop with Loic Tallon whose work at the Metropolitan Museum and other institutions has been incredible. He helped us see where our strengths were and how to focus our project so that we were able to complete it in the project’s timeframe.
Our own project R.E.A.D as we’ve detailed in the other posts in this section, was a completely new way of doing something using technology that was already established but not yet combined, especially not in museums. To have the freedom to work on a MVP (minimum viable product) was very liberating and just goes to show how important this sort of funding is to innovation. We are hopeful that the project will now live on through its open-source libraries and I’ll personally be looking at it as an accessibility solution in future projects.
Once again, a huge thank you to the teams at Ars Electronica and Ecsite who managed to organize webinars, workshops and meetings across the continent and across time zones. This was truly a massive task and the way they carried it out fostered a sense of belonging and teamwork throughout all the participating museums. This has been a fantastic experience and I look forward to carrying on the work in the future.
Phil Jones
Head of Digital Innovation
St Ives Museum and Cornwall Museums Partnership is part of the DOORS – Digital Incubator of Museums network. DOORS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101036071.
