Nordiska Museet Deploys Bluefin Square Touchscreens for Photo Archive
2026-11-05 · via invidis
Stockholm's Nordiska Museet has installed interactive digital photo albums built on 22-inch square touchscreens from Bluefin, running content management software from Pixilab. Swedish distributor Visono Media handled the installation. For operators who work in museums, visitor centers or other experience-driven spaces, it is a useful case study in how display format choice can shape an exhibit as much as the content on it.
The installation sits inside Nordic Moments, a new exhibition drawing on the museum's archive of roughly six million photographs spanning Nordic everyday life from the mid-19th century to today. According to the museum, only a small portion of that archive had previously been accessible to visitors. The collection also survived a flooding incident at a storage facility that damaged negatives, which had to be frozen and later treated by conservators before some of this material could be digitized and shown.
The exhibition runs across seven rooms. The touchscreen installation lives in a section called Photo Albums of Nordic Life, where Bluefin's screens are built into custom wooden frames designed to resemble traditional photo albums rather than standard kiosks. Visitors sit at the stations and browse curated sets of images organized around themes such as daily routines, the changing seasons and Nordic traditions.
Square Format, Specific Reasoning
Bluefin's displays run at 1920 x 1920 pixels with 500-nit brightness and integrated Intel computing hardware onboard, according to the announcement. The museum says it chose the 1:1 aspect ratio specifically because the photo collection includes portrait, landscape and square images, and a conventional widescreen monitor would have forced a compromise on how those images were framed and would have looked more like a generic screen than an album. That is a deliberate break from the 16:9 default most signage hardware ships in, and it is worth noting for any integrator working on heritage or retail projects where the display needs to disappear into a designed object rather than announce itself as a screen.
Content is managed through Pixilab's Blocks platform, which the museum says lets staff update collections, add new material and schedule changes without touching the physical installation. The announcement does not say how many stations are deployed, what the installation cost, or whether Bluefin's hardware was customized beyond the standard panel spec. It also does not detail how content is synced across stations or whether the museum plans to expand interactive access to more of the archive.
Matti Shevchenko Sandin, a producer at Nordiska Museet, said the team wanted to avoid simply filling a room with screens and instead find a format that felt distinct. The project points to a broader trend in museum signage: moving away from off-the-shelf widescreen kiosks toward form factors tailored to the content itself.
The announcement in full
Reproduced from invidis for reference. Digital Signage Magazine did not write the text below.
Stockholm's Nordiska Museet is using Bluefin displays and Pixilab software to let visitors explore thousands of historical photographs through interactive digital albums.
Stockholm’s Nordiska Museet has installed interactive digital photo albums using 22-inch square touchscreens from Bluefin and content management software from Swedish company Pixilab. Visono Media, a Swedish distributor, was involved in the installation, too.
The installation is part of the museum’s Nordic Moments exhibition, which draws on an archive of approximately six million photographs documenting everyday life across the Nordic region from the mid-19th century to the present.
Until recently, only a small portion of the collection had been accessible to the public. The museum also faced a major conservation challenge when flooding at a storage facility damaged parts of its photographic archive, requiring negatives to be frozen and subsequently treated by conservators.
The new exhibition spans seven rooms, with the interactive installation located in a section called Photo Albums of Nordic Life.
Bluefin’s 22-inch square touchscreens are integrated into custom wooden frames resembling traditional photo albums. Visitors can sit and browse curated collections covering subjects such as daily routines, changing seasons and Nordic cultural traditions.
The displays feature a 1920 x 1920-pixel resolution, 500-nit brightness and integrated Intel computing hardware running Pixilab Blocks software.
The 1:1 screen format was selected to accommodate photographs in portrait, landscape and square orientations without the appearance of a conventional widescreen monitor.
“We thought to make a room with screens is not a new thing. But how can we make it more interesting?” said Matti Shevchenko Sandin, producer at Nordiska Museet.
The Blocks platform allows museum staff to manage the digital albums, introduce new collections and schedule content changes without modifying the physical installation.
The project illustrates how interactive displays can make large photographic archives more accessible while maintaining the familiar experience of browsing a traditional photo album.