V&A Arts and Crafts

3form designed and built the microsite for the V&A's International Arts and Crafts exhibition, which ran from March to July 2005 and drew 116,000 visitors. The site carried the exhibition's 23 themed sections, ticketing, the conference and events, an e-card maker and a competition, and an Explore section that was the interesting part.

Explore held a virtual tour of the three galleries and the shop as 21 QuickTime VR panoramas, with clickable objects that pulled their records straight from the museum's collections database, which 3form's write-up at the time called a first for the museum. Beside it sat a zooming object viewer with 3D rotations of the exhibition highlights, a searchable database of Arts and Crafts objects, a printable trail around the V&A, and a map of Arts and Crafts buildings in London.

Design a Tile was the piece that took off. Inspired by William De Morgan's tiles, it let visitors draw their own tile in the browser, see it repeated, save it to a moderated gallery, rate other people's, and send it to friends. The response in the first month was so large that we extended it so visitors could view and rate each other's designs. The V&A's annual review for the year counted over 14,000 contributors' designs in the gallery, and it stayed live for years afterwards. It was, for the museum, an early step into visitors making things on its site.

The V&A showed the tile designer at Museums and the Web 2006 as an example of visitor involvement, and the microsite was nominated for that year's Best of the Web award in the online exhibition category.