DRAW TO ART

Short List
TitleDRAW TO ART
BrandGOOGLE
Product/ServiceINTERACTIVE EASEL
Category G02. Spatial Tech
Entrant GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Google Creative Lab Google Arts and Culture Creative Lead

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 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

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. 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. 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.

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 children's. 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.