Samek Art Gallery App – CSCI 475/6 Senior Design

Project Description

We’re looking for a motivated team of students to design an interpretive, user-friendly app for our Kress collection of Renaissance and Baroque European art for walk-in visitors to the gallery to use on our iPads (but could be useable on anyone’s device, should they want to download it). Ideally, the app keeps people looking closely at the art as they learn. It must support a range of media, including text, image, sound, and/or video. It should be flexible enough and easy to use on the back-end so that it can be updated with new content as needed. This app will answer our visitors’ questions and maybe pose some new ones along the way.

Goals

To provide an easy to use, interactive way to explore our Kress collection
To give Samek visitors access to rich content
To pilot this program for use in other Samek exhibitions

Impact

The Kress Gallery is often underused by the public. This app should provide a welcoming new way to explore the exhibition and demystify some of the aura surrounding Renaissance and Baroque art.

Constraints

The application must not distract from the art, rather, it must encourage visitors to look more closely, or look again at an artwork (for instance, through augmented reality).
The app should be flexible enough to be updated by Samek staff with little technical programming knowledge as needed to update content when works of art are rotated, or new research becomes available.
Content must be approved and vetted by Samek staff and Art History faculty
The app must work on an iPad, since these are the mobile devices we have available to us.
The app must be intuitive enough for a wide general public to use on their own.
The app should be visually well-designed to meet the high design standards we set for any of our exhibition interpretation. It should fit within the Samek’s branding scheme.

Resources

Most of the resources needed, I expect to be intangible, such as access to research and results from focus groups and audience testing. We can certainly supply the iPads, but I am hoping not to need resources beyond what is already available to the university. My initial idea for this project was an augmented reality-based app, but I am not sure if this is possible with Bucknell’s current software development resources.