Powerhouse: digital transformation of a museum renewal

The program

Powerhouse — Australia's museum of applied arts and sciences — is mid-way through a once-in-a-generation renewal: a new flagship museum at Parramatta, the revitalisation of the Ultimo site, and the digital estate that has to serve both. [VERIFY] The technology program spans the public web presence, ticketing and membership, the collection and content platforms, and the systems embedded in the exhibitions themselves.

My remit is the architecture across all of it: making sure the individual workstreams — content, commerce, identity, in-gallery — compose into one coherent platform rather than a set of point solutions.

Exhibition technology

Part of the remit is the technology inside the galleries themselves — the digital experience layer, AV infrastructure, and the data systems that keep objects, their interpretation and their media coherent across an exhibition. [VERIFY: which exhibitions and details the owner is comfortable naming publicly]

• Exhibition technology architecture and infrastructure strategy
• Object interpretation kept in sync with the collection source of truth
• AV and interactive infrastructure designed for longevity and maintainability

The platform workstreams

The renewal's digital estate decomposes into workstreams that each carry their own case study on this site — designed so they compose over shared contracts rather than point-to-point integrations:

• Content API — a headless, event-driven content platform decoupling the CMS, collection system and DAMS from every channel that consumes them
• TNEW / Tessitura — ticketing, membership and CRM integrated with the web estate
• Auth0 — one identity layer across museum properties and internal tooling
• Exhibition technology — the in-gallery digital layer, fed by the same content platform as the web

Where it's heading

The platform workstreams — content, ticketing, identity — are designed to ship independently against shared contracts. A museum renewal is a long program, and the architecture has to outlive any single project inside it.