Depot, in your hand.

A depot is not an exhibition. Nothing is arranged for you, and that is the point.

Works are stored by climate and size, not by school or century. A Rembrandt drawing shares a rack with a chair. Visitors arrive expecting a museum and find a working building — which is thrilling for ten minutes and disorienting for the next fifty. The museum had tried an audio tour and a paper map; both fought the building instead of using it.

The brief we agreed on was short: help people read the room they are standing in, do not make them look at a phone more than at the racks, and do not ask anyone to install anything. A guide, not a second museum.

Start with where you are, not with what we have.

Every screen answers the same question first: what is around me? Open the guide anywhere in the building and it names the storey, the climate zone and the three racks nearest you, in that order. Search exists but is buried on purpose; the button people actually press is “show me something strange here”, which picks one unlikely object within thirty metres and tells you why it is stored where it is.

We prototyped in the building from week two, on the real floors, with the conservators walking behind us. Half the early ideas died there — an AR overlay lasted one afternoon, because holding a phone up in a room of glass racks is both awkward and reflective.

The building tells the guide where you are.

148 low-energy beacons sit on the rack ends, two per storey per wing. The phone listens, never transmits, and resolves a position to about four metres — enough to know the storey and the aisle, never enough to know a person. There is no account, no analytics on individuals, and the position never leaves the device.

Above the object list sits a small model of the depot: your storey lit, the rest in outline. Turning it is the only gesture in the product, and it is there because visitors kept asking the same question at the balustrade — “what is under me?” The model answers it in one look.

A plain progressive web app: server-rendered HTML for the object pages so they are fast on the museum’s guest network and indexable for the collection site, a small client for positioning, and Three.js for the depot model — 22,000 triangles, one draw call per storey, and a static image fallback for anything without WebGL.

Object data comes from the museum’s collection system over a nightly export; nothing is duplicated by hand. Positions are held in a signed manifest so a rack can be moved by a registrar in the afternoon and be correct on the floor that evening. The whole app is 41 KB of JavaScript over the wire, which mattered more than anything clever: the building has concrete walls and one hopeful repeater per floor.

Front end

Server-rendered HTML · 41 KB JS

Model

Three.js · 22k triangles · static fallback

Position

148 BLE beacons · ±4 m · on-device

Data

Nightly export · signed rack manifest

Languages

Dutch · English · German

Visitors, year one

212,000Of 268,000 through the door

Median session

41 minThe guided tour is sixty

Racks described

1,844Of 1,844 accessible racks

Beacons placed

148Two per storey, per wing

Install required

NoneA URL on the ticket

Support tickets

31In fourteen months live

The museum runs it without us. Two people on the collection team publish new racks and route notices themselves; our last change was a Dutch copy fix in March 2023. It has been running for the whole of the building’s public life so far, through three storey reshuffles and one flood drill.

Client

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Creative direction

Yara Belkacem

Technology

Ruben de Wit, Tobias Meyer

Design

Sanne Vermeulen

3D

Dario Costa

Motion

Imke Jansen

Strategy

Nour El-Sayed

Production

Lea Brandt

Text

Boijmans curatorial team

Photography

Not used — the racks are the picture

All five projects →