Digital Product as Institutional Practice at the Barnes Foundation

First published on the Barnes Foundation's Medium, May 2026.

Building mission-driven digital infrastructure, platforms, and product practice inside a museum context

It’s been a while since we wrote here. When this publication started in 2017, the Barnes Foundation team was sharing the early stages of the philosophy and architecture our digital work that continues today. Many of those projects are still alive and well, joined since by new platforms, programs, and partnerships. Returning here, we’ll share what’s been built, what we’ve learned along the way, and what it looks like when digital practice matures into institutional infrastructure.

Some highlights you may have heard about since then: we built an in-house software engineering team, released our in-gallery and mobile interpretive platform, Barnes Focus, and launched a first-of-its-kind online education program built on the Visual Experience Platform (VXP), which now hosts all of our online Art History and Appreciation classes. Our work on the platform was recognized by Amazon Web Services for its impact on access and reach and for an implementation that scaled real-time virtual classes to learners across all ages.

Alongside these visible milestones is a deeper layer of systems developed in-house to enable data-driven decision-making across membership, ticketing, donations, and learning experiences, with member, guest, and student experience treated as the primary constraint.

In the past few years, the Barnes has taken on operational partnerships that extend our digital infrastructure beyond the institution itself. These include serving as the operating partner for the new Calder Gardens in Philadelphia and as the operating partner for Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Tools originally built to support our own programs have been hardened through years of operational use and now run as shared, configurable infrastructure in collaboration with other institutions. This includes the launch of an online museum education graduate program with Saint Joseph’s University, which extends our digital teaching systems into accredited higher education, as well as a formal partnership with the Penn Museum to host and deliver their popular digital education programs on the VXP.

Tools originally built to support our own programs have been hardened through years of operational use and now run as shared, configurable infrastructure.

Today, digital practice at the Barnes grows our educational mission and reaches new audiences. It functions as instructional and pedagogical infrastructure, operational enablement and capacity, and increasingly as a way we partner with peers in the field. This shift brings new responsibilities: to articulate what we’re building, why certain choices are made, how those choices reflect our values as an educational institution, and how digital investments are prioritized, sequenced, and sustained. It reflects a changing funding landscape for cultural institutions, where digital infrastructure increasingly supports earned revenue and long-term sustainability. It also reflects a moment in which AI-assisted development is materially changing what a small in-house team like ours can build, sustain, and offer to peers. How we adopt these tools, and how we hold them to the same standards of accessibility, durability, and editorial integrity we apply to everything else we ship, is part of what we plan to bring to the field this year.

This shift brings new responsibilities: to articulate what we’re building, why certain choices are made, how those choices reflect our values as an educational institution, and how digital investments are prioritized, sequenced, and sustained.

I’m Olivia Steinmetz, and I help steward this work as part of the Barnes’ digital product and web development team. I work across engineering, UI/UX design, and product strategy to translate the Barnes’ mission and educational values into durable digital systems, and to ensure that how we build is as intentional as what we build.

Every tool we build at the Barnes follows the same arc: iterative design, tight research-to-backlog cycles, heavy investment up front, gradual reduction of operational overhead, eventual self-service capability, and selective licensing to peer institutions. In practice, this looks like long-term, mission-aligned commitments scoped and phased deliberately, with tradeoffs surfaced early and standards around accessibility and visitor experience applied consistently across initiatives. Decisions about platforms, data, and governance are made with durability and scalability in mind, and constraints are treated as a way of staying aligned with the institution’s educational philosophy rather than drifting toward novelty for its own sake.

Constraints are treated as a way of staying aligned with the institution’s educational philosophy rather than drifting toward novelty for its own sake.

In the posts ahead, we’ll walk through the design and build process behind the VXP, share what we’ve learned from sustained operational use, and describe how operating a dual-brand digital ecosystem for the Barnes and Calder Gardens has shaped our approach to shared, configurable infrastructure. We’ll also examine how accessibility, governance, and institutional values function as design constraints that improve the work rather than limit it, and what AI-assisted development looks like in our 2026 day-to-day practice.

This is the start of a longer conversation, with more posts in the coming weeks. If you’re working on similar problems, we’d love to compare notes.

Take a Barnes online class, or learn more about Barnes Focus and the Visual Experience Platform. For institutional inquiries about our platforms and partnerships, contact us. Follow the Barnes Foundation on Medium for the rest of the series. Up next: Designing and building a platform for close looking.

Digital Product as Institutional Practice at the Barnes Foundation was originally published in Barnes Foundation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.