And the winners are....

authors: Lizzy Komen

Europeana Creative attended the Future Everything conference in Manchester, where, alongside the main programme, the project awarded the best ideas in app development and creative re-use of open (culture) data in the framework of the Europeana Creative Design Challenge.

The session Europeana - The Future of Cultural Heritage started with an open discussion of the challenges, opportunities and future scope of digital cultural heritage re-use. Representatives from Europeana, Culture24 and the creative industry took part in the discussion, which highlighted barriers such as restricted licenses, the disparity between quantity and quality of data and content on Europeana and the need for a better feedback loop between creative industries and cultural institutions on needs.

Following the discussion a creative re-use example was presented by Christina Holm from the Copenhagen based design company SpildAfTid. Culture Cam is one of the pilots coming out of the Europeana Creative project. Culture Cam is a webcam based similarity search tool offering designers, artists and all creative people the possibility to explore cultural heritage images on Europeana in a fun, playful and intuitive way. People in the audience were invited to try to tool on their mobile devices and share their results (#culturecam).

After this exciting demonstration, is was time for the four selected Design Challenge finalists to pitch their ideas to the audience and judges:

• Public Domain City: First platform for the cross-disciplinary exploration of illustrated archival books for new creative works. It is an online image stock of curious illustrations from digital archival book collections specializing in the 15-mid 19th C. archival books on science, technology, medicine, flora and fauna from the main openly-licensed collections.
• Digital Story Cubes: A gamification/storytelling mobile application with pedagogical and creative potential enabling users to visit museums and cultural institutions actively & better express narratives, and in turn develop a stronger sense of self through.
• Gallery Dynamic: Uses modern low power screens combined with modern processors connected through the internet to showcase a digital wallpaper. Curated for the customer to bring varied art and culture to the everyday workspace.
• Digital Souvenir: Creating physical digital souvenirs which tell the digital stories of European cultural institutes cultural blending and integrating the offline and online worlds. using laser, 3D technology and Augmented Reality.

The jury asked some questions after the pitches and there was also a special role for the audience to get involved as they were invited to vote for their favorite application using the TouchBack system. The winner is awarded the Audience Prize 2015 at Future Everything.

AND THE WINNERS ARE...

The award ceremony took at place at the RNCM, where all the finalists, interested parties and jury members joined for the celebratory announcements.

Silvija Aurylaite- winner of the Europeana Creative Design Challenge next to Max Kaiser and Jill Cousins (right). Photo credit: CC BY-SA Lizzy Komen.

The winners of the Europeana Creative Design Challenge were announced by Max Kaiser, coordinator of the eCreative project, and Jill Cousins, executive director of Europeana. The two winners are: Gallery Dynamic by Alistair McDonald and Public Domain City by Silvija Aurylaite. Public Domain City also won the Audience Prize 2015. Both winners win an incubation support package to help them further develop their ideas and bring them to market. Both ideas show great potential in the creative re-use of cultural heritage materials available via Europeana.

The following day, the winners were already offered a first workshop to talk about the needs, barriers and wishes for the continuation of their ideas and for the experts to help set up the tailor made support package that will guide them in the next 3 months.

Alistair McDonald - winner of the Europeana Creative Design Challenge. Photo credit: CC BY-SA Lizzy Komen.

Congratulations to the winners and stay tuned for more information about the developments of all the winning ideas!