International Museum Day
Rapidly Changing Communities
For this years’ International Museum Day, themed “Rapidly Changing Communities”, which focuses on how museums can navigate and contribute to a world undergoing profound social, technological, and environmental shifts, Design Museum Gent takes the opportunity to look back at the recent activities of Studio Digitaal.
Active since 2024, Studio Digitaal investigates the role design can play in understanding and shaping the digital technologies that are increasingly interwoven with our everyday lives. As new technologies like web3 and blockchain and AI applications emerge, their impact on society and the environment get more tangible. The studio critically explores how these technologies influence design practices and what role museums can play in understanding and engaging with them. Beyond reflection, Studio Digitaal also takes an active role in bringing these new technologies into the museum environment and fostering experimentation. In line with ICOM’s Sustainable Development Goal 9 — which sees museums as drivers of innovation and accessibility — the studio collaborates with designers, developers, and researchers to co-create sustainable, inclusive digital tools and experiences.
A central tool in this effort is the museum’s REST API, developed to offer direct access to digitized objects and their metadata. By opening up the collection in this way, Design Museum Gent encourages creative reuse, supports open access, while aligns with international standards and data profiles. Several innovative projects have already emerged through the API, each one reimagining how we interact with new technologies and heritage collections.
One example is Lost in Diffusion, by artist, programmer, and engineer Kasper Jordaens. Using the museum’s collection database, Jordaens retrained a diffusion model to explore how algorithms and AI can reinterpret museum collections. The goal was not just to make the machine better understand the nuances of design, but also to generate a model that could potentially function as a co-agent alongside the designer in the design process, rethinking the relationship between humans and machines.
Another ongoing project is Searcher, a collaboration with Searcher Studio, a collective of artists, designers, and data experts. Inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Searcher proposes new ways to navigate digital collections: not just through keywords or categories, but through visual similarity, metadata links, and unexpected associations between objects and texts. It challenges how both museum professionals and visitors engage with heritage in the digital age — not by speeding up, but by slowing down and offering space for reflection The project’s first prototype was presented at Collectible, FTI’s expo at Wintercircus, and MAO’s Castles in the Sky exhibition.
When the museum opens, SEARCHER will become part of the museum’s freely accessible zone, where it continues to explore how digital tools can foster deeper, more sustainable connections with design heritage.
