On 20th of April, Europeana Fashion held in collaboration with Platoniq a co-creation workshop in the wonderful venue of the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam!

On Wednesday 20th of April, 35 professionals from different institutions gathered together to attend the Co-Creation workshop organized by Europeana Fashion with the team of Platoniq, open culture developers and social innovators, to brainstorm, propose and discuss innovative ideas for the promotion of digital fashion heritage. Among the 35 participants, we had representatives of museums and archives, like MoMu Antwerp, Israel Museum, Rossimoda Shoe Museum, ModeMuze, SPK Berlin, PFF Nafplio, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Rijksmuseum, professionals of brand archives, Iike the Benetton Group, academics from the Central Saint Martins school, the College of Arts of the University of Edinburgh and the IUAV University of Venice, and various professionals and creatives, like UX designers, curators and developers.

Mauricio O'Brien giving a welcoming speech at the Co-Creation workshop at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo by Europeana Fashion,CC-BY-SA.

The participants were welcomed by staff of the Rijksmuseum that co-organised and hosted the workshop. After a welcoming speech by Marco Rendina, Technical Director of Europeana Fashion International Association, Mauricio O’Brien and Olivier Schulbaum from Platoniq introduced the aims of the workshop and the way they would have been achieved during the day.
At their arrival participants were asked to identify themselves as curators, designers and producers and to divide in groups: the first task for each group was to identify an interesting or useful app, website or project related to fashion heritage and analyze which were the valuable and weak points of the product.
The next step was to fill out a chart with new possible scenarios in which specific users, such as students, researchers, scholars, curators or just fashion enthusiasts, had to complete a specific task, and inventing for them an instrument to solve their problems or fulfil their needs More than 25 interesting ideas were proposed, voted and ranked to end up with a final selection of five
These five ideas evolved, through fast prototyping, into wireframes. “Spot it”, for example, is an update on a classic-style mobile app using Europeana Fashion’s dataset, where a user can shoot or upload a photo, and perform a synthetic search for similar items in the Europeana database; while “Fashion Pockets” has been conceived to allow users to select, group and store different items together. “Accessory Search” offers curators of historical costume exhibitions the possibility to find all the information they need about special accessory objects. “Fashion Time Machine” will give instructions and patterns for the re-creation of historical fashion objects; “Pattern Finder” for vintage clothing, knitwear and craft enthusiasts, who can search this site for re-usable, public domain, shareable patterns for tailoring, knitting, crocheting and “Europeana Research”, a search tool, through which one could perform very detailed searches and receive excellent results with many related items which could be offloaded to a personal space.

The participants sharing ideas, comments, evaluations at the Co-creation workshop with Platoniq at Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. Photo by Europeana Fashion, CC-BY-SA.

During the workshop the attendants also assisted to short lesson on Creative Commons licenses and the Europeana Publishing Framework. Some of the partners had also curated a selection of twelve objects from their collection, that was shown during this short introduction to image licensing and re-use. These selections of pictures from the collections of Europeana Fashion’s partners, The Israel Museum, Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation and Netherland Institute for Sound and Vision, are now accessible on Europeana Fashion’s Pinterest!

The participants at the Co-creation workshop with Platoniq at Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. Photo by Europeana Fashion, CC-BY-SA.

The results of the fruitful day of collaboration are now to vote, and the project that will be elected as a winner, will be furtherly developed and eventually realized. Stay tuned to learn which idea will eventually be produced, or to learn more about the next events, workshops and edit-a-thons!