Poster World. Bespoke AI Meets Curator Expertise for Public Engagement

Though museums are digitising their archives, online consultations remain low. New forms of engagement bring these digital memories to life and can support museums in maintaining and developing digital resources. Artificial Intelligence presents opportunities to showcase this rich heritage, but it also raises issues of transparency and cultural relevance. We explored these questions through a collaboration with Zürich’s Museum für Gestaltüng on its unique poster collection. We looked at how calculating similarities between digitised documents could create new user experiences with emotional and cognitive impact. Throughout the project, designers worked with engineers to investigate bespoke algorithms and graphic representations of their outputs. After an initial state of the art and preliminary tests, we developed three scenarios for a museum installation. Investigating three hypotheses, we evaluated the prototype scenarios with user experience psychology protocols. Our results show the value of combining artificial intelligence with curator expertise, the impact of similarities extracted by mathematical modelling and the importance of how they are visualised. We also found no significant difference between the perception of novices and experts in our results. This fosters a strategy for museums which brings different audiences together. The final installation, which combines elements from all three scenarios, opened to the public at the Museum in February 2022.