Louvre Abu Dhabi is the universal museum on Saadiyat Island, built under an agreement between the governments of the UAE and France and opened in 2017. Jean Nouvel’s domed building is as much of a draw as the collection beneath it, and the museum sits at the centre of Abu Dhabi’s cultural district.
Louvre Abu Dhabi runs Live for visitor-facing digital signage.
A museum is the hardest room to put a screen in
Most digital signage exists to get attention. In a museum, the screens are the one thing in the building that must not.
Everything a visitor came for is on the walls and in the cases, and lighting, sightlines and the visitor’s attention have all been designed around those objects, often by the architect. A display that is too bright, plays motion at the wrong moment, or sits where it interrupts a view is not a small design error in that setting. It is damage to the thing the institution exists to do.
Which is why the signage brief in a cultural venue inverts the usual one. The screens carry practical information: what is open today, which temporary exhibition is running and until when, where the ticketing and cloakroom are, which galleries are closed, and what is on this afternoon. All of that changes constantly. None of it should compete with the collection.
What that demands from the CMS
Three things, and they are the same three every visitor attraction asks for.
Scheduling that matches the day, not the week. Opening hours, guided tour times, talks and late openings are all time-of-day events. Content has to appear and disappear on schedule without anyone being on site to press anything, which is what dayparting is for.
Different content in different zones from one system. Entrance and ticketing, galleries, the temporary exhibition, retail and food, and any staff-facing screens are all separate audiences in one building. Display groups let them be managed as zones rather than as individual devices.
Reliability without supervision. A museum does not have a signage operator on the floor. The Live players cache their scheduled content locally and play from storage rather than streaming, so the screens keep running through a network problem instead of going black in front of visitors during opening hours.
Specifying signage for a cultural venue
Three questions settle most of it, and they are worth answering before anyone looks at a screen. Which zones need their own content and who owns each one. What has to change on a schedule rather than on request, which is usually more than a venue expects once opening hours, talks and late openings are counted. And what happens to the screens if the network drops during opening hours.
If you are working through those for a museum, gallery or attraction, ask sales for a reference call and compare notes with a venue already running it.