Victorian Cultural Network: Public Access Node

01.] Introduction
Project brief: Develop a modular physical environment to access digital content on line from Victoria's leading cultural institutions and create a physical experience that acts as an appropriate gateway to Victoria's cultural capital. The individual nodes or sites must also act as banners for this digital network initiative. The key collaborators in the Victorian Cultural Network are the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square Management, Museum Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of Victoria and the Victorian Arts Centre Trust, the Koorie Heritage Trust and a number of regional institutions. The purpose of the project is to contextualise Victoria's cultural collections through stories and themes of state significance, making them available to the public as an online integrated resource, making that access easier and allowing for increased awareness of cultural programming.

This project presented a unique design opportunity to create a channel or portal into, not only individual Victorian cultural institutions, but also to a connected cultural landscape. It represented the possibility for new ways of accessing existing cultural collections and institutions and for linking them. We wanted to focus on presenting a design that captured some of the emerging possibilities, technically, spatially and strategically. Investment in new communications technology occurs against a background of ongoing cultural change on the part of the public and their use of communications technology. Their response to and expectations of contemporary technology are not static. What is impossible or unusable one year becomes desirable the next and ordinary and expected the year after. The design had to allow for possible technology changes without undue disruption or reconfiguring.

The project to design the public access nodes began with research, surveying emerging technologies and public information system scenarios. Our intention was to address the pertinence of the broader underlying trends in information access and identify where benefits from a public access site could be made. The evolution and patronage of the internet, video games, chat rooms, blog sites, mobile phones, lap tops and ultra mobile personal computers, iPods, Mp3 players, cable television, vidcasting and podcasting has generated new patterns of use and expectation that previously did not exist. These changes are just the latest iterations in an ongoing evolution of modes of behaviour and interaction that are characteristic of a society that has gradually institutionalised innovation in communications technologies. Technologies like the internet, the Nintendo Wii and the iPod are tending to invite their users to proactively engage in customising and personalising their purchases unlike older pre-packaged communication products like television and books where the product is complete at the time of purchase. This sets up an expectation of greater user freedom and control. We needed to communicate a similar sense of user control in order to attract interest.

In the mind set of the general public architecture is the passive back ground to active technology and also the evermore pro-active user. Public spaces are understood as impassive and solid. Like the background cells in traditional animation, architectural environments never change while everything else glides past them as life unfolds. This is of course not the case with exhibition environments where walls can be moved and the spaces undergo significant change and are configured to create widely varying and rich experiences. These changes however appear to the general public as predetermined remotely and within the confines of a curatorially authorised domain. We wanted to give a sense of informality and potential change to the viewing nodes, that they might unfold or reconfigure. These access nodes are ambassadors of or taxis to the institutions and their collections.

page: 1 | 2