The New National Vision creates a high-quality museum experience

The National Museum Helsinki

National Museum of Finland

The reimagined vision of a future museum visitor experience is contemporary, immersive and accessible for all.

Future foresight & scenarios, Customer insight, Innovation roadmaps, Business design, Service Design, Concept design, Customer & visitor experience design

The National Museum of Finland asked Pink Eminence and Pentagon Design to carry out a service design review of a future museum experience. The museum is planning to build a new annex building on its site, offering local visitors and visitors from elsewhere an internationally high-quality museum experience of a new kind of Finland.

Alongside the classic National Museum building that breathes Finnish cultural heritage, it is intended to design a new building consisting of adaptable space solutions that provide a framework for new type of internationally compelling events and concerts. The New National Vision aims to be a functional and architectural reinterpretation of what ‘national’ for Finns means today.

Approach

During the project, together with Pink Eminence, the client, and future users and partners, we envisioned an inspiring future visit experience and a purposeful concept to help develop the museum’s activities. The holistic experience was seen as a combination of the historic building, the new building, and an open-air park that is open year-round to the use of urban events and communities.

New types of stakeholders related to the renewal of the museum were identified and invited to prepare the new concept. A total of 80 potential partners and representatives of potential visitor groups took part in the project, with whom we developed new activities and aimed to identify the possible needs and motives. Ingredients for the Future Vision were shaped by bringing together potential partners, event producers, restaurateurs and public sector officials to ideate and share views on the direction of the development. On the basis of the vision, the spatial needs of the various activities were finally concretised into the project plan during the project.

As part of the assignment, our team also participated in defining the objectives for the new building, which explored the various new types of content, functionalities and service possibilities of the future space, and defined their boundary conditions preparing for the architectural competition. Event production needs, industry benchmarks, business logic and production perspectives to the vision were delivered by consultancy Pink Eminence and event production expert No Fear Agency.

Result

During the project, together with Pink Eminence, we formed three alternative scenarios of the visitor experience, which eventually resulted in a co-chosen direction: the New National Vision. The Vision presentation material, such as the website we designed and developed, enables the National Museum to present the construction project of the new building and to seek and negotiate funding with potential partners. The vision also sets the direction for the design competition of the building and its architectural design. The construction is scheduled to start in 2022.

“The starting point and assignment of the upcoming architectural competition will be based on the concept created through design.”

—Elina Anttila, Director General, National Museum of Finland

In our experience, close cooperation between architectural design, service design and user participation can create a built environment that effectively serves the various needs in an appealing way.

The National museum Helsinki

The National Museum Helsinki