Promise was an international culture project commissioned around 1998 by the European Commission (EC) – Directory General IV and X – with the purpose to create a European “virtual” museum on CD-ROM so that the diversity of the cities of Antwerp, Helsinki, Weimar, Newcastle and Lecce’s cultural heritage as well as the common European heritage were accessible to the public world-wide.
The idea was to take these 5 European cities and highlight one specific touristic or cultural element (a person, building, art movement or style) from each one of them and then cross-check this with the other cities. So you would have 17th century baroque painting from Antwerp, Functionalist architecture of the Helsinki olympic stadium, Baroque churches of Lecce, the Bauhaus school in Weimar and the industrial revolution in Newcastle upon Thyne. To achieve this the navigational system or interface (nobody was talking about UI/UX in those days) was based on an XY axis. On the left you had the content categories and on top you had the 5 cities.
The project was basically stuffed to the rim with audio, video, original photography and interactive maps of all the different cultural topics.
At that time I was working as a freelance art director doing digital design, information architecture and interactive navigational solutions for Brussels based Magic Media.
Unfortunately these are the only remaining visuals of the project.
This project was designed and developed at Magic Media – © 1998 Magic Media
