Client
Five College Museums
Year
2026
Location
Massachusetts
(USA)
Role
Digital identity,
Interactive direction,
Prototyping,
UX / UI
Category
Museum,
Repository,
Collections,
Research
The Five College Museums is a partnership of five higher-education institutions in western Massachusetts, USA. It allows students and faculty to share academic resources, courses, facilities and activities across five separate campuses.
The consortium provides access to extensive collections of paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, manuscripts, historical documents and archaeological objects, representing artists and makers from ancient, European, American, modern and contemporary traditions.
A primary goal of the consortium was to give equal prominence to each museum's individual identity within the broader context of a unified interface, allowing each museum to retain a distinct digital presence while seamlessly connecting them through a shared relational database.
Leading the digital direction and brand design for the new public facing platform, I mapped the information architecture, prototyped user-flows and proposed the visual direction. I ran a three day workshop in Massachusetts with their staff and senior directors to present the platform.
Interactive direction
The identity focuses on mapping functional database quiries with contextual paths, enabling serendipitous exploration.
Visual identity
Each museum is distinguished by colour-codes and assigned labels for ownership, while maintaining overall consistency through typography and layout.
Exploring the catalogue
Presenting curated paths with dynamic content along with a generative 'shuffle' to give a window into the collections.
Searching the repository
Browsing tools include categorised autocomplete, filtering metadata, sorting options and setting thumbnail layouts and table views, with the ability to combine criteria.
Object records
Individual detail templates support three dimensional object views, multi-media, hyperlinked metadata and relationships.
Responsive
The interface adapts to ensure the user experience is consistent across hand-held devices.
Museums
The collections can be explored together or individually, helping each museum to have its own individual experience while maintaining the context of the wider consortium.
Research
A key objective is to create space educational research and scholarship. Individuals can save objects to albums, write notes, share online and download exports, as well as inquire about the materials collected.
Narratives
Educators and students are invited to publish written pieces to share knowledge and historical research of the collection, with customisable interactive maps and timeline modules.
