Expertise Day at the HU FCJ (1)

No, no HU FCJ is not a Hungarian Football Club, but the acronym stands for the Faculty of Communication and Journalism (FCJ) of the Utrecht College (HU). Yesterday I was present at the Experts’ Day, a special day for the students who are involved in projects during their third and fourth year. The school has three streams: digital communication, communication management and journalism. The students from the digital communication stream are not educated to be designers, but all-round project managers and marketers.

The program started off with a brain storm. A marketing employee of the Dutch ING bank, Rutger Hamelynck, told the audience that the bank is sponsoring the Rijksmuseum, which houses Rembrandt van Rijn’s famous painting The Night Watch. In this framework the bank is looking for ideas to run touch screen information sets in some of their bank shops and at the Amsterdam airport Schiphol. The project has been dubbed the digital guestbook, but this was just one idea.

(Photograph by Hasan Yilmaz)

Within three quarters of the hour I registered more than 25 ideas, ranging from a variation on the Da Vinci Code to a Rembrandt code, an MSN avatar or an MSN bot, e-ticketing routine for full service such as transport tickets and transport information as well as service after the visit to the museum, an exhibition of the masters interspersed with painting from amateurs. Have a picture taken with a visitor in a painting like The Night Watch and send it by e-mail to friends back home. Organise a tour through the museum for young people with the famous Dutch rapper Ali B. In several groups the idea came up of Pimping my Rembrandt.


ING has now a list with ideas to start thinking about. But it will be difficult to choose from the list as they have more than one objective. The touch screen information point should improve the loyalty towards ING and toward the Rijksmuseum. And loyalty the Rijksmuseum can use badly as there is a very small hard core of visitors above 50 years of age and a very large group of people who visit the Rijksmuseum only once in their life. So getting Dutch visitors to go for the second time to the Rijksmuseum will be an improvement of 100 percent. And the level of American visitors is still not back to the pre-9/11 level.

Tags: cultural heritage

Blog Posting Number: 402