Design Museum

General information

City / Country: London / England

Theme: Design

Languages: English

Platforms: Web

Web accessibility: The Design Museum website follows the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 to Priority 1

Mission: "The Design Museum is one of the world's leading museums devoted to contemporary design in every form from furniture to graphics, and architecture to industrial design" (http://www.designmuseum.org/about-us)

Outstanding features: This is a wealthy website in multimedia documentation about design history, and about past and current exhibitions.

Maps

http://www.designmuseum.org/hiring/design-museum

There are no maps or floorplans. User can retrieve information about different sections of the museum, and access to a 360 interactive view of each space.

Exhibitions

Current and past exhibitions

http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions

General information about the exhibitions.

GOOD PRACTICE Every exhibition page contains links to additional information sources. It allows users to prepare the visit, or to retrieve more information after visiting the museum.
Those links include different kind of resources: audio guide (mp3), blog, media releases, external documents, ...

GOOD PRACTICE Exhibition page also allows users to buy a ticket.

Online exhibitions

http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/a-century-of-chairs

HTML-based catalogue of relevant objects from design history.

Discover design

http://www.designmuseum.org/discoverdesign/

HTML + Flash-based introduction to design.

Resources

Design Museum website contains a lot of multimedia resources, generally included in the pages where there is related information; also available in generic sections.

Links to external sites that contain information about specific contents (exhibitions, ...)
Links to external documents (pdf, e-zines, interviews, posters, ...)
Podcasts
Video files

Podcast

GOOD PRACTICE http://www.designmuseum.org/podcasts

Design at the Design Museum

HTML-based collection of pages about the designers, architects and technologies featured at the Design Museum.

Online activities

There are some educational activities, all of them in pdf files, and gathered into two sections:
- Schools + Colleges (http://www.designmuseum.org/schools-and-colleges)
- Families (http://www.designmuseum.org/families)

Schools + Colleges

Example of activity (pdf file) aimed at primary school students.
http://www.designmuseum.org/media/item/74263/1681/DM_download_eco.pdf

Families

Example of activity (pdf file) included at the Families section.
http://www.designmuseum.org/media/item/74541/1812/side1_05.pdf

Visit planning

There are no special features to plan the visit. Nevertheless, documentation included in exhibitions pages can help the user to plan his visit.

Visit follow-up

No special features to follow-up the visit.

Online community

There are no resources for online community, although some exhibition pages can eventually contain links to external sites that support an online community.

Mobile features

No features for mobile devices.

Searching & browsing

Browsing behavior based on
- a main top menu
- a secondary menu that opens above the selected option
- a specific menu at the right of the contents area (it contains links to additional information).

GOOD PRACTICE At the right side of the main menu, user can find the Quicklinks pulldown menu, that contains the most frequently visited links of the site.