Culture Shift Athens brought together designers, developers and innovators with the local cultural sector to tackle arts and cultural challenges using technology as a driver. The challnges set included how to increase audiences to museums and how to embed digital capabilities within cultural organisations in Greece.
Snook, a Glasgow-based innovation company, designed and delivered the programme and led the teams through the process of developing user-centred ideas and prototyping methods. Mentors from the Greek arts and cultural community provided feedback and guidance, supporting the teams to test their business ideas and refine their products.
Google was the event sponsor, and offered a residency at their YouTube space in London to the team with the most successful idea.
Final ideas included: Art Snatch, an application for museum visitors to collate a list of their favourite artefacts, creating memories of their experience and offering the opportunity to purchase souvenirs. Another idea was Flea, a game experience for young people, encouraging them to solve a range of clues in cultural venues, both online and offline.
Not all ideas focused on museums – another idea for an app, City Whispers, engaged users through push notifications (whispers) on their smartphones related to their location, informing them of ‘hidden’ cultural sites of interest, both old and new.
First place was awarded to PulseMapp; an app that relies on user generated content to inform citizens of cultural events happening in their immediate vicinity. Second place went to SmallTalk! – an interactive, educational app allowing cultural venues to bring exhibitions to life by engaging viewers in an instant message conversation with individual artefacts.
Congratulations to the winners, who will be coming to London in the next few months. We're also delighted to hear that at least one new business has been set up by people who met for the first time at Culture Shift Athens!
You can get a taste of the event on Storify. If you are thinking of running your own hack event, we've put together a guide to help you.
Many thanks to our partners Google, Snook and colleagues Aneta Quraishy and Irini Vouzelakou.