What's On: how leading institutions handle it
Reference board for the outdoor touchscreen. Live screenshots captured at portrait width, since that is the format we are designing for. Each is credited with the studio behind it where that is on public record.
Compiled 9 September 2026 · Desa Potato Head digital
The pattern behind Dan's links
The agencies Dan sent are mostly brand studios. The platforms are usually built by a separate digital partner, and on the biggest jobs both are credited together.
- Getty is the clearest proof. AREA 17 built the "One Getty" platform in collaboration with Studio Scott and Two by Four. Brand studio plus digital partner on the same job.
- 2x4 did Fondazione Prada's identity: a flexible brand identity platform linking the foundation's activities across locations and programmes. That is the system, not the build.
- AREA 17 is the one that keeps appearing on the build side. Fondation Cartier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Getty, The Menil Collection, Glenstone, Barnes Foundation, Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard Art Museums, Opéra national de Paris, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of the Future.
- Southbank Centre shows the same split in the UK. Manifesto rebuilt it with Dutch agency Today Tomorrow, pulling events from Artifax and media from Bynder. An earlier phase ran through Axis12 with Fabrique, who did the Rijksmuseum.
- Sometimes Always is a different scale. Gabriel Finotti's studio, Berlin and São Paulo, graphic and editorial led. The Last Museum for KW Berlin.
The thing to take from this: nobody hands What's On to the brand studio. The identity comes from one place and the programme platform from another, and the platform is nearly always wired directly into a ticketing and scheduling system rather than hand-updated. That is the argument for the CMS feed on our screen.
Built by AREA 17
The strongest evidence of a house style for programme-led institutions.
Date-first indexes
Where volume forces structure. Barbican is the reference for our filter model.
Editorial overviews
Curated and flat, closer to a magazine than a calendar. Works below roughly twenty items.
What this means for the wall screen
- Every one of these is a seated, mouse-driven website. None of them is signage. The nearest relatives to what we are building are airport and museum wayfinding panels, not these pages.
- What does transfer is the date-first control: Barbican's Today, Next 7 days, Next 30 days is close to what we have.
- What does not transfer is the filtering depth. Barbican has a full type filter and a month picker because it runs hundreds of events. We run roughly fifteen a day.
- The image-led card is near universal. Nobody presents a programme as a text list.
Screenshots are of live pages captured 9 September 2026 and will drift. Glenstone, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada and Harvard Art Museums all blocked automated capture, so they are not shown here; all four are AREA 17 builds and worth opening directly.