SMartART – When the images speak of art

Product White Paper
Paolo Mazzanti, Italy , Roberto Caldelli, Italy

Published paper: SMartART “When the images speak of art”

SMartART is an idea based on ICT, winner of “Make Culture” category @diversity European Competition, that promotes culture, emotional involvement and informal learning in museums and it has been presented by MICC at the European Culture Forum 2013 in Brussels. An ensemble of 263 ideas were submitted to the Competition, a jury of international experts nominated 50 projects and chose 12 winning ideas that could potentially shape the future of the cultural and creative sectors. The project is receiving tailored professional coaching on developing a business plan, legal issues, access to finance, marketing and networking.

SMartART is an innovative solution to create an enriched visit of a museum and a way to make culture increasing user interaction and his engagement in learning from an image; an image is easy to recognize, enjoyable and emotionally involving, connecting the experience of seeing art works with the experience of learning about them. It provides a smart fruition of museum information, because it joins together images and words with an innovative and smart technology accessible through users’ smartphone.

A museum can valorise artworks using SMartART-pictures and in a smart way it can use words and information to communicate, explain, educate, disseminate knowledge and stimulate emotinal learning. Learning becomes a process of active engagement with experience that leads to desire to learn more and to share knowledge.

The idea considers both the “cognitive” component of learning and also the “emotional” one that influences the motivation of the subject. SMartART picures create user motivation, a way to be interested to learn through an emotional involvement and it allows the user to receive information selecting a picture he made. SMartART Application creates customized scenarios to enjoy accessible and usable smart solution during and after the visit.

The Museum can make marked labels of the original painting, that can be used to diversify the contents and customize the user experience. The user, during the visit, can take a picture of a label located in specific supports inside the gallery. With the SmartArt application installed on his smartphone, he can receive all the additional information that Museum would like to provide him. When the user is back home, he can easily interact with the contents of the visit again, share these within the social networks and learn more by means of recognizable, understandable and reusable images.

The technology behind this system is the Digital Watermarking, that imperceptibly embeds informative data (mark) inside a digital picture; these labels are more useful and easier to recognize than a QR-Code image. SMartART idea creates emotional SMartART marked pictures that can be considered a new paradigm of digital culture for museum and ‘smartcities’ of the future: images can “speak of art when they are questioned.”