Last week we talked about our philosophy of being ‘of the web‘, rather than just having the museum ‘on the web’.

And so onto our latest partnerships, our stepping stones to make this a reality.

Behance

We’ve worked with Behance, to deepen the exposure of the National Design Award winners through the creation of a branded gallery on their platform.

Rather than the museum making (another) microsite, Behance offers us a way to put the award winners into one of the largest professional social networks used by designers themselves. You can now browse projects by the winners, finalists and jurors – all within their platform.

Behance brings huge exposure to the winners, and the awards, and we’re expecting that many more people find out about the awards than would ever have made it to our own site.

Lanyrd

And we’ve partnered with event calendaring Lanyrd to highlight design events across America this month. Lanyrd offers a branded site for National Design Week, and, at the backend, has allowed us, in the words of Aaron Cope, ‘to get out of the calendaring business’ (which museums shouldn’t ever be part of!). Aaron’s also been able to whip up a nice little mobile web app – helped by the normalisation of the data feed provided by Lanyrd. (App post soon!)

Art.sy

You already know we are one of the larger contributors to Google Art Project, and now we’ve also contributed to another pan-institutional project, Art.sy. I’m excited by this because it challenges Art.sy’s ‘art genome‘ tools to deal with a design collection. And also because the site itself very publicly reveals the porous boundaries between the art market and the art museum.

Read the New York Times piece on Art.sy which quite nicely demonstrates the subtle rift between the old (on the web) and new (of the web) worlds.

And . . .

And finally, you might notice that if you happen put the URL of one of our collection objects in a tweet, you get a nice little ‘expanded’ bit of information, complete with object thumbnail and @cooperhewitt attribution! That was Aaron’s Friday afternoon treat. Next stop is a custom short URL to make that whole process a bit nicer on the eyes. Cool, huh?