museum of the city of new york
CULTURE • MUSEUMS • EDUCATION • COMMUNITY
How do you make 750,000 stories feel like they belong to everyone?
The Museum of the City of New York has been telling the city's story for more than one hundred years. Its collection — spanning photographs, paintings, costumes, toys, theatrical memorabilia, and more — holds the memory of a city defined by perpetual transformation. But a collection is only as alive as the people who can access it. MCNY came to us with a challenge as ambitious as the city itself: design an online experience that would open their collection of over fifty thousand artifacts to any visitor — the lifelong New Yorker, the recent transplant, the student on a field trip, the academic deep in archival research — regardless of whether they arrived with the name of an artist, the title of a work, or any prior knowledge at all. The goal was radical accessibility, starting right from the homepage.
CHALLENGE
Museum collections have traditionally been organized for specialists — catalogued by artist, technique, or category in ways that assume a certain kind of prior knowledge. For the general public, and especially for the kind of curious, diverse audiences that reflect New York City itself, these systems can feel more like walls than windows.
The challenge was to serve two very different audiences simultaneously — and to serve them well. Everyday New Yorkers and curious visitors deserved an experience that felt immersive and alive, not institutional. Researchers and scholars needed the depth, precision, and thoroughness their work demands. A single design had to hold both.
APPROACH
We designed a dual-path experience — two distinct journeys through the same collection, each built around how a different kind of visitor thinks, explores, and finds meaning. An Immersive Path for the Curious: For everyday visitors — the New Yorkers who love their city and want to see themselves in its history — we designed an experience that leads with wonder rather than taxonomy.
Rather than asking visitors what they already know, the experience invites them to explore through what they feel and see.
The experience is multi-dimensional by design:
Location. Visitors can navigate the collection geographically — exploring artifacts tied to specific neighborhoods, streets, and corners of the five boroughs, letting place be the entry point into history. Sound. Audio elements bring the collection to life, connecting objects to the sounds, voices, and rhythms of the city they came from.
Visual browsing. Visitors can move through the collection purely by image — letting visual curiosity guide discovery without needing to name what they're looking for.
Multi-criteria navigation. Layered filters — by era, theme, category, borough, and more — allow visitors to cross-reference and narrow without feeling overwhelmed, surfacing unexpected connections across the collection.
A Thorough Path for Researchers For scholars, historians, and specialists, we built a separate, structured path designed for depth and precision. Detailed cataloguing, advanced search and filtering, provenance information, and direct access to archival records give researchers the thoroughness their work requires — without pulling them through an experience designed for someone else. Underlying both paths was a shared design system — a visual language for the collection that was built to scale alongside the museum's ongoing digitization work and became the foundation for all of MCNY's digital branding going forward.
RESULTS
The collection accounted for twenty-five percent of the museum's total website traffic
The collection's visual design system became the basis for all of MCNY's digital branding going forward
The digitized collection has grown from fifty thousand to nearly two hundred and five thousand accessible objects — a four-fold expansion supported by the scalable architecture we put in place
The collection is now featured on Google Arts and Culture alongside more than two thousand museums worldwide, extending MCNY's reach to a global audience
The experience is accessible through Bloomberg Connects, placing MCNY's collection in the hands of visitors through a free, purpose-built digital guide New York City has always belonged to everyone who lives in it. We believe its museum should too.
This project is a reminder that the most powerful thing design can do is remove the distance between a collection and the people it was meant to serve — all of them.
Listen to our conversation with Lacy Schutz on the Project Inclusion Podcast with great insights about museum and culture.
