In November 2014, the Harvard Art Museums opened a new building that includes a public space called the Lightbox Gallery. This gallery is an open-ended, cross-disciplinary collaborative space for research and development into new modes of inquiry, interaction, and display in the realm of the art museum digital experience.

While digital platforms are often built for a single purpose, permanent project, or temporary exhibition, our aim was to create a platform that targets a variety of uses and can be changed with one click of a mouse. The Lightbox Gallery is this platform.

In this paper, we discuss our decision making about the design of the Lightbox, the hardware we’ve deployed, the software frameworks we’ve developed, the projects and programs that have taken advantage of it, and the lessons learned during the inaugural year.