Villa Mondriaan, Winterswijk, Netherlands
The Villa Mondriaan is a unique museum based partly in the childhood home of pioneering abstract artist Piet Mondriaan. The young Mondriaan frequently painted the surrounding area and left home in 1892 to study in Amsterdam - changing his name to ‘Mondrian’. Today this small but thriving museum runs on a committed workforce of over 75 volunteers. The museum displays a collection of Mondriaan’s early realist works alongside the work of his tutors, transporting visitors into the life of Piet Mondriaan.
Challenge:
After temporarily closing due to COVID-19 the Villa Mondriaan was looking for an easy to use cost effective platform to help them reopen. With a staff made up predominantly of volunteers and facing the task of implementing social distancing measures in the newly reopened museum, Villa Mondriaan needed to be able to share their audio tour in a safe manner for visitors that wouldn’t eat up staff time. They were also looking to highlight key works in their collection and share Piet Mondriaan’s early realist works with a wide audience.
Our solution:
We gave the Villa Mondriaan access to the Smartify dashboard to manually manage the visitor experience. This enabled gallery staff to easily create guided tours by dragging and dropping works into a trail and customising an interactive tour. By using Smartify’s easy to use content creation tools, focusing on key artworks and using preexisting audio the Villa Mondriaan was able to reopen easily with the Smartify audio guide set up and ready to go in a matter of weeks.
Build an evolving story around your collections. The Smartify CMS provides for standard functionality plus fields for video, audio, hyperlinks, multiple images, interactive maps and even 3D scans. Narratives can be developed for specific audiences such as children, researchers, or the general public for instance.
Result:
In the first month the museum was reopened the app was used almost 8000 times to discover more about the works in the collection. The museum launched a one hour tour of the collection delivered straight to users devices ready in time for reopening that was listened to over 2000 times during the first month.
https://smartify.org/tour/audiotour-villa-mondriaan