Working with the world’s leading art and design museum
Deliverables:
Overview
The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects, books and archives that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.
The primary V&A website is delivered and maintained in-house, but their digital team does not have the resource to deliver websites for programmes and specific projects. Kind have been appointed to deliver a number of digital design and development projects that fall outside of the remit of the V&A’s digital team.
“Our mission is to be recognised as the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance, and to enrich people’s lives by promoting research, knowledge and enjoyment of the designed world to the widest possible audience”
Culture in Crisis 🔗
As part of the museum’s commitment to supporting communities that suffer cultural loss through conflict, criminal acts or natural disaster, the Culture in Crisis programme brings together those with a shared interest in protecting cultural heritage and provides a forum for sharing information, inspiring and supporting action and raising public awareness.
Kind was commissioned to build a portal to share data on the funding of cultural heritage projects to help add clarity to the decision-making process and better inform future funding allocations.
Launch project
“This free digital resource and our Culture in Crisis programme is a demonstration of the V&A’s ongoing commitment to protecting the world’s cultural heritage and supporting communities that suffer cultural loss.”
The site needed its own brand identity different to the V&A, it had to be fast, responsive and stable and able to handle a lot of data input from different places. Above all it needed to be simple and help users quickly search for projects with a variety of terms, we used Algolia to ensure lightning-quick search speed.
The portal has been well received by the cultural heritage community and has since had hundreds of projects added by The British Council, Historic England, Arcadia and many others.
Performing Glastonbury 🔗
Glastonbury Festival is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. Glastonbury really sets itself aside from other live events and has become one of the most famous festivals in the world. Because of this, the V&A wanted to capture what has happened at the festival and how it continues to grow over the years.
Launch project
In 2020, Glastonbury Festival reached a milestone anniversary of 50 years. During this time the festival has increased dramatically in size, attendance and reputation. The history of the festival has been captured over the years in different formats, but the V&A, in collaboration with the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), wanted to document the history of the event by building an online archive to host information such as programmes, posters, signage, maps, images, performances and the various stages.
We used AusStage and Algolia search to ensure data that was captured was refreshed every night to ensure the content was always up-to-date regardless of where that content had come from. Whilst it was a pilot project, we’re hopeful they continue to capture incredible memories from this incredible festival for years to come.
Creswell Digital Archive 🔗
We have been asked to build an online photographic archive for K.A.C Creswell who during his lifetime captured hundreds of images of important architectural sites in the middle east. The V&A is working in collaboration with a host of international universities and museums to bring the collection together for the first time.
