Title	DRAW TO ART
Brand	GOOGLE
Product/Service	INTERACTIVE EASEL
Category	D04. Digital Installations
Entrant	GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Google Creative Lab	Google Arts and Culture	Creative Lead

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation ?

Draw to Art is an innovative and scalable way to engage with the Google Arts & Culture brand in any physical spaces and a creative way to discover art using machine learning.

Background

Since 2011, Google Arts & Culture has digitized art collections from museums all around the world to make art more accessible to everyone. Google Arts & Culture asked us to create a way to help people discover the millions of pieces in the collection in a relevant and personal way. Our objective was to bring Google Arts & Culture inside museums and cultural spaces and to create a scalable installation that can be installed and used easily in cultural locations & during events.

Describe the creative idea

Draw to Art is a new experience that uses machine learning to match your doodles to drawings, paintings and sculptures from museums around the world. We created a series of interactive easels so everyone can use Draw to Art in a tangible way in events and cultural spaces. With Draw to Art, everyone can now use their own creativity to discover artworks from the Google Arts & Culture collection in a whole new way.

Describe the strategy

Draw to Art was built to be very easily usable by everyone with little explanations - Draw something on the left of the canvas and visually similar artworks are presented on the right, making it one of the most intuitive way to discover works of art. We created Interactive Easels which can be easily installed in any space, and have a low per unit cost.

Describe the execution

Using machine learning, we trained a deep neural network to recognize visual features in doodles, like shapes, lines and perspectives. We also trained it to recognize the same features in paintings, sketches and sculptures from the collection so Draw to Art can associate doodles to similar works of art. The best matches are then presented to the user who can help teach the neural network by rating the matches to help improve the results for everyone. We spent the first month of the project testing out different machine learning models and prototyping different user interfaces - we then finalised the digital design and worked with a product designer to create the interactive easels.

List the results

Draw to Art was unveiled to museum partners & influencers on the 5th of March in the Google Cultural Institute lab in Paris where it’s now permanently installed and is used daily by visitors who ranges from international politicians to school childrens. It has since then installed in more than 15 exhibitions and events, including large scales exhibitions in the Grand Palais in Paris and the Long museum in Shanghai where 8 easels were installed. Visitors spend 10 min+ on average using the easels Google Arts & Culture now has an easily scalable installation that everyone can use to discover artworks in a whole new way using machine learning.