USEUM is the first ever crowd-sourced art museum and its mission is to make art accessible and appealing to the average Internet user.
By Foteini Valeonti, USEUM. Presented at Crowdsourcing Week Global 2016. Learn more and join the next event: www.crowdsourcingweek.com
1. USEUM: Making Art Accessible with
Crowdsourcing & Gamification
Foteini Valeonti
Founder of USEUM / PhD Candidate at UCL
Willem van Haecht "The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest" 1628
18. Empower the Users
Art Lovers
Describe with Tags
Artists
Promote Portfolio
Platform Specialised
for their Medium
Profit from Gifts &
Prints
19. Empower the Users
Art Lovers
Describe with Tags
Rate
(Implicit Crowdsourcing)
Artists
Promote Portfolio
Platform Specialised
for their Medium
Profit from Gifts &
Prints
20. Empower the Users
Art Lovers
Describe with Tags
Rate
(Implicit Crowdsourcing)
Add Artworks
Artists
Promote Portfolio
Platform Specialised
for their Medium
Profit from Gifts &
Prints
21. Empower the Users
Art Lovers
Describe with Tags
Rate
(Implicit Crowdsourcing)
Add Artworks
Author Educational
Content
Artists
Promote Portfolio
Platform Specialised
for their Medium
Profit from Gifts &
Prints
31. User Generated Content vs.
Voluntary Crowdsourcing
"Girl with a phone" Levon Avagyan (Armenia)
32. User Generated Content vs.
Voluntary Crowdsourcing
"Girl with a phone" Levon Avagyan (Armenia)
Difference: The Purpose
All content contributed is organised and used
towards the completion of the project’s end goal.
33. User Generated Content vs.
Voluntary Crowdsourcing
"Girl with a phone" Levon Avagyan (Armenia)
Difference: The Purpose
All content contributed is organised and used
towards the completion of the project’s end goal.
34. User Generated Content vs.
Voluntary Crowdsourcing
"Girl with a phone" Levon Avagyan (Armenia)
Difference: The Purpose
All content contributed is organised and used
towards the completion of the project’s end goal.
35. Challenges
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
36. Challenges
IPR Lawyers
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
37. Challenges
IPR Lawyers: “You can’t do that”
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
38. Challenges
IPR Lawyers: “You can’t do that”
Worked with Artists
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
39. Challenges
IPR Lawyers: “You can’t do that”
Worked with Artists / Favourable Timing
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
40. Challenges
"Hoisting Our Dreams into the Light of Another Sun" Paul Bond (US)
IPR Lawyers: “You can’t do that”
Worked with Artists / Favourable Timing
Image-based Crowdsourcing
Function of UGC but Purpose of CS
Motivation
Attracting Contributors
52. The use of game design elements
in non-game contexts
Gamification
Lucas van Leyden "The Game of Chess" 1508
53. The use of game design elements
in non-game contexts
Gamification
Lucas van Leyden "The Game of Chess" 1508
“The word for what’s happening at the moment
is pointsification”
Margaret Robertson
54. The use of game design elements
in non-game contexts
Gamification
Lucas van Leyden "The Game of Chess" 1508
“The word for what’s happening at the moment
is pointsification”
Margaret Robertson
Gamify = Pleasurise
Prof. Jesse Schell
57. “Getting Gamification Right” by S. Deterding
Meaning
Gamification Acts as an Amplifier
Willem van Haecht "The House of Cards" 1737
58. “Getting Gamification Right” by S. Deterding
Meaning
Gamification Acts as an Amplifier
Mastery
Clear Goals with Variable Challenge
Willem van Haecht "The House of Cards" 1737
59. “Getting Gamification Right” by S. Deterding
Meaning
Gamification Acts as an Amplifier
Mastery
Clear Goals with Variable Challenge
Autonomy
“A free space to play in and something to play with”
Willem van Haecht "The House of Cards" 1737
61. Gamification on USEUM
Vincent Malo "Peasants Playing Cards outside an Inn" 1623
Meaning
Help build the World’s Art Museum
62. Gamification on USEUM
Vincent Malo "Peasants Playing Cards outside an Inn" 1623
Meaning
Help build the World’s Art Museum
Mastery
You are the “Top Contributor of The Getty”
63. Gamification on USEUM
Vincent Malo "Peasants Playing Cards outside an Inn" 1623
Meaning
Help build the World’s Art Museum
Mastery
You are the “Top Contributor of The Getty”
Autonomy
Unlocking Tools & Higher Levels of Freedom
Hi I am Foteini Valeonti and today I would like to talk to you about USEUM and our attempt to make art easily accessible with crowdsourcing and gamification.
USEUM started as my PhD at the UCL here in London and it was based on a very simple idea.
At the time it struck me that although there is a Go-To platform for every popular form of content, such a platform for art did not exist.
So if I wanted to look up a movie trailer I would go on IMDb, or if I want to read a book review I would to go on GoodReads, but what if I want to look up an artwork? I still had to go on Google or some other generic search engine.
But in our days, where everything has already been invented, if something hasn’t been done before, it can only be for two possible reasons.
First, that it’s unnecessary – so you have an idea and you think it’s great, but nobody else does.
Or - the other reason is, that it’s indeed a great idea, which many people would like to see become a reality, but it’s very very hard to implement.
In the case of USEUM, I discovered it was the latter.
So, before anything else, the first thing I did, was to into whether it’s possible at all to develop a platform that has the potential to become the Go-To platform for art.
The outcome of this research was revealing. What I discovered was that although all the Go-To platforms are based on crowdsourcing, this approach had never been taken for an art platform. So at that staged, I told to myself, that I had to at least try.
And that is how USEUM was born, the first-ever crowdsourced art museum.
It started from my part-time PhD and then after we raised a seed round of £100,000 it transformed to a fully fledged startup company.
To date USEUM exhibits 70,000 paintings by 8,000 artists, including 2,000 participant contemporary painters from 105 countries around the world.
The community has given more than 100K artwork ratings, used more than 25,000 meta tags to describe paintings and it counts more than 100 Senior Contributors.
Now, being the first ever crowdsourced art platform our goal was one - to empower our platform’s users.
The groups of users we attracted initially were mainly two: The Artists and the Art Lovers
For Artists we offered them a new platform to promote their art.
And in particular, the first ever platform that specialises in their medium. By exhibiting only painting and illustration, USEUM is the ideal platforms for the work of painters and illustrators to be appreciated.
Last but not least, we offered them the opportunity to profit from selling gifts and prints featuring their art, worldwide on demand with no upfront costs.
For Art Lovers, we first enabled the most commonly-used type of crowdsourcing in cultural projects; to describe paintings with meta tags.
Then, Art Lovers can express their opinion, not only with comments, but also with their ratings, becoming this way, the platform’s only curator. The artwork rankings on USEUM are all implicitly crowd-sourced from the users’ ratings and other activity such as the hearts.
Art lovers can even add artworks on USEUM, a feature which was very challenging for us to implement, as we will see later on.
Last, it’s been a few months now that we have introduced textual content relating to art history on USEUM, with all the texts being written and reviewed by contributing authors.
Users, lie at the very heart of USEUM and that’s why we tried to give them as much power as possible.
Now how would such a platform, help make are more accessible?
Looking up “Accessible” on the dictionary it comes up with: “easily obtained – understoood – appreciated”.
Our goal on USEUM is to organise all the information around art available on the Internet and make it easy to access, search and browse through.
Also since the addition of educational content on the platform in which our rule is only one – to use simple language even if the subject is Abstract Art -
Our goal on USEUM is to organise all the information around art available on the Internet and make it easy to access, search, browse and learn about.
Furthermore with the educational content the directive is only one: to explain in simple language “What is Impressionism”, “What is Hyperrealism” the movements history and context, always in simple terms.
People search and describe on USEUM with simple terms.
Last I consider “appreciated” being very closely linked with “understood” – the minute we learn about something, we find out about its context, be it historical or political, then we get to understand it and appreciate it.
However our grand vision so to say, when it comes to the accessibility of art, is that USEUM we help change the perception of art being distant and exclusive, meant only for the privileged few.
The fact that I am using IMDB.com to watch trailers, rate movies and keep lists of my favourite movies, doesn’t make me a cinephile.
It should be the same for art. In order to enjoy and appreciate art, we don’t need to be art world insiders.
So, previously I mentioned we encountered a few challenges, so I thought I should elaborate on those a bit more.
USEUM was one of the few crowdsourcing platforms that asked volunteers to contribute images not just textual information and people are not very familiar with that. So we had to explain to users that when it comes to adding artworks, USEUM works more like a UGC platform such as Pinterest, but with the purpose of a crowdsourcing project.
So, what is it that clearly distinguishes User Generated Content Platforms from Voluntary Crowdsourcing ones?
The purpose – the existence of an end goal. So, all the content that users add, is organised and used towards the completion of the projects end goal
We continually generate content for YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, but all that content besides the fact that it is being shared with our followers, not much happens to it.
On the other hand – when IMDB first started 25 years ago from a group of cinephiles, the content they were adding was towards their goal to build the Internet Movie Database. The same was the case for Wikipedia – The World’s Encyclopaedia and for all other crowdsourcing platforms. The content users contribute is being used for a purpose.
Communicating to users “image-based crowdsourcing” was one thing. If we now consider that these images are not photos that they themselves took, then this brings another problem; that of copyright clearance.
Since we had the priviledge to have early investors, we arrange a meeting with an Art Copyright expert. Once we explained to him what we were trying to do, asking for his advice on how to do it properly…
But so many websites are doing it !
No. It’s still illegal.
What if we cite the source?
Doesn’t matter.
…he blantly turned back and said – “Unfortunately you can’t do that”. And then we argued, but so many websites are doing it! People upload on Pinterest images from around the web all the time! “Well that doesn’t make it legal…” And what if we cite the source, would that help? Apparently that doesn’t matter at all legally, unless the image is under a particular Creative Commons license. So how did we work around this?
We went straight to the copyright owners. For more than a year, USEUM was exhibiting only contemporary art from participant painters and illustrators from all around the world.
Then one day, a friend of mine sent to me a press release stating that the National Gallery of Art in Washington was making available thousands of copyright-free Old Masters images on-line. And in the following months more and more museums would follow the footsteps of NGA. Asking from our contributors to help us bring all those works on the platform and after months of work, we managed to bring Old Masters on USEUM.
Last but not least, as it’s usually the case for projects utilising voluntary crowdsourcing, motivating and attracting contributors was a challenge.
Why? Well it ends up being that crowdsourcing has a lot to do with motivation.
To be motivated means to be moved to do something (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and there are mainly two types of motivation.
Intrinsic motivation – where we do something for “its inherent satisfaction” - because it’s fun, or it’s a challenge we would like to take [CITE].
And extrinsic motivation – where we do things we don’t particularly like, but we are going to get paid for them, or they will look good on our CV for example.
So you wonder why motivation has a lot do with crowdsourcing?
Because if there’s one thing that defines crowdsourcing is that participation is optional. People need to be moved to participate in your project.
For Crowdsourcing projects involving financial rewards, that’s not too much of a problem. Research shows that for such projects, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the posibility to earn money is the main incentive of participants.
Therefore money is an incentive strong enough to motivate people to take part.
But what about voluntary crowdsourcing? The absence of extrinsic incentives makes it quite hard to motivate participation.
That’s the gap Gamification has managed to fill in. Since its emergence, gamification has been widely used in crowdsourcing and for the vast majority of voluntary crowdsourcing projects the incentive system is solely based on gamification.
Gamification is a buzzword that since its hype in 2011 it has received a lot of attention.
By definition, it refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts [CITE]. The Frequent Flyer Programmes in the 90s was one of the earliest examples of gamification, although the term had not been invented yet.
The problem that came with gamification was that what was happening was not gamification but pointsification as game designer Margaret Robertson described it. There was this perception that gamifying an application means adding a point system, some badges and a leader board.
But gamification is a lot more than that. As game designer and Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell described it, gamification is about the fundamental understanding of what is pleasurable to people [CITE] and when we succeed in gamifying something we are subsequently making it more pleasurable.
What gamification does essentially, is that it taps into people’s intrinsic motivation. We don’t need financial rewards to incentivise people to participate, because we can instead offer them intrinsic incentives.
And how do we do that? One of the first frameworks on gamification was introduced by Sebastian Deterding in his presentation “Getting Gamification Right” and I am going to cover here its main points.
First your platform must first have real meaning. Gamification is only an amplifier, for it to work you should offer contributors something meaningful, or you should involve them in a story that makes them meaningful.
Then its mastery; the experience of feeling competent, and the way to achieve that is by providing interesting challenges with clear goals of variable challenge, so that challenges are neither to hard to make them feel nervous nor too easy to make volunteers feel bored.
The last point is Autonomy; you should spark volunteers’ curiosity by giving them the tools and also the freedom to explore. In other ways a free space to play in and something to play with.
On USEUM gamification is implemeneted around the three pillars of Deterding’s framework.
First from the very beginning, we invited contributors to help build the World’s Art Museum
Then we provide them with clear goals with interesting challenges and we try to offer them experiences of Mastery. If you have managed to become the top contributor of The Getty collection, your name appears on the collection’s page and you are in charge of reviewing all future contributions around this profile.
Last is autonomy – the more senior contributors become, the more functionality they unlock and the higher the level of their freedom on the platform.
Since we have been using gamification for a while now on USEUM I would like to share with you a couple of observations
First, when you are willing to give your users freedom on your platform be prepared to be surprised. Contributors will take initiatives and you will catch yourself thinking “Well that’s not what that button is supposed to be for” What your contributors are doing, is that they are rethinking your platform and how we dealt with that we listened to them and worked directly with them.
And that leads us to the second point; communication. In a platform where the same entry can be edited by 10 different people it’s important that these people are in sync.
And one last thing before I go. Previously, I mentioned how the mission of USEUM is to make art easily accessible and also about our efforts to do copyright clearance for the vast majority of artworks on USEUM.
So today we are delighted to announce that USEUM will be joining Open Data movement.
And in the next few months we will allow users to download every painting on USEUM that is free of copyright in high resolution and for any purpose, including 50,000 Old Masters artworks. That’s a step that brings us closer to make art easily accessible.