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Center for Urban Pedagogy

2012-01-10T20:18:00Z

Center for Urban Pedagogy’s new website is live! The new site brings together all the great programs, projects, workshops, and events that CUP regularly initiates, in a fun way – it reminds us of their office. In the gutters of each page are a changing series of playful icons extracted from those activities and linked to them. The website also features a store where the output from each collaboration may be purchased or downloaded – so buy some merchandise and help CUP continue to generate interesting, informative projects in the future! And, come join us at their launch party on Thursday Jan 19. Congrats, Brian! More on Flickr

For kids!

2011-11-01T00:03:00Z

After designing the Whitney Museum’s website in 2010, in 2011 we introduced a major new area for kids: Whitney For Kids. The new site turns the main Whitney website’s design grammar on its head, keeping some of the same structure and attitude but giving it a whole new look. Kids can explore all the same artists and artworks as adults can, but in their own design language, and dozens of artist and artwork pages have all new, richly engaging kid-specific content.

Kids can also do a lot more than adults. They can make their own pages on the Whitney’s website, using a kid-friendly version of the same content management system used by Whitney staff. They can take quizzes and polls, tag artworks, collect art, upload their own art, and browse the art of both Whitney artists and other kids. And they can change the background pattern of the whole website, for all to see, using a fun and educational tool.

The design has been described as “hallucinatory” and kids really seem to connect with it, using the site in many different ways. Some slowly explore all the art; others just want to make their own pages and add tags. Those approaches map to two major approaches of the site: Emphasize parallels and connections between kids and artists; and create a discursive space, like a crowd of kids in a museum who can all hear and see each other talking about and reacting to what’s around them. More text and images

Congratulations Mary!

Above: The homepage provides many ways to enter and interact with the site, from browsing and collecting artworks from the collection, to taking fun quizzes, to browsing other kids’ uploaded artwork. To help kids make connections between the ways that Whitney artists make art and how kids today create their own art, works by Whitney artists are paired with artwork by kids on the landing page. Pages about featured Whitney artists often emphasize the processes and life experiences of each artist.

Many museum kids sites feature a limited number of artists or (even worse) a limited number of activities or games, creating a small “walled garden.” Our approach sought to open the entirety of the Whitney to kids, in ways that are even more ambitious than what’s available to adults. To accomplish this, we created modular features that can be re-used across many artists and artworks, rather than specific games. This allowed museum educators to create their own rich pages for each artist. Pedagogically, on our side we focused on features that were about museum-going, curation, and art-making itself – and even features that are about a museum website, such as making your own pages. In this way we created an entire virtual museum just for kids, as many-faceted as the Whitney itself. This approach also allowed us to leverage all the work that we and the Whitney have invested in the main site, in a new way; and even to try out some features that may eventually make it back to the adult site. The site is a work in progress, and more content will be added over time by museum curators, educators, and kids themselves.

Above: The Whitney’s complete collection presented in a fun, kid-friendly environment. Kids are also prompted to access and engage and with artworks by answering fun questions, tagging artworks and finding tags that interest them, adding artworks to their own online collections and curating multiple collections, and more.

Above: Featured artists’ pages are created by Whitney staff using our content management system from colorful and easy to use text, image, video, and prompt modules. Kids engage by watching videos, exploring the materials used by artists, spending time with the artwork images themselves and reading about them, and in many other ways.

Above: Kids are prompted throughout the site to take quizzes, answer questions, vote on and tag artworks. We were skeptical about the quizzes feature but found that some kids were surprisingly into it.

Above: Fun voting prompts. When you vote or take a quiz, a badge appears on your page.

Above: One kid’s page that he made.

Above: To work on their pages, kids use a kid-friendly version of the same content management system used by Whitney staff to create the rest of the website (our content management system, Economy).

Above: The pattern maker. Anyone can change the background of whole website, which affects the site for everyone. Patterns you’ve made also appear on your page so you can go back to them if you want.

Above: The pattern maker also includes examples of artists from the Whitney’s collection who use pattern and algorithm – a nice example of how this site seeks to make connections between exploration and practice, and between active and passive learning.

Above: Like the rest of the Whitney’s site, the kids area turns black at night.

Greengrassi

2011-10-19T21:43:00Z

Our new website for Greengrassi, the London art gallery, has just launched. Obviously it’s red. The site emphasizes images, acting as a visual archive that can repay in-depth exploration better than many gallery websites do. More images

100 Survivors

2011-09-29T16:37:00Z

With artist Julia Kim Smith, we’ve launched 100 Survivors, a collaborative photo and video project for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Through a Flickr group, participants contribute photos responding to 12 prompts, so the site exposes both commonalities and radical differences in women’s experiences and voices, and includes both familiar snapshots of everyday life and highly specific interests and observations. The site begins with a mutable diptych that appears as the last user left it, and you can also see the diptych’s history. Julia writes that the site “hopes to inform and inspire by looking beyond ‘awareness’ and ‘supporting the cause’ and focusing on the experiences of actual women with breast cancer.” Please share! Facebook
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Calendar

2011-09-29T13:50:00Z

We’ve launched a new online arts calendar for Yale. For the first time, this calendar brings arts events and performances from many institutions and departments across this large university, together onto one surface. Members of the public can find something that interests them, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level can use the calendar as a tool to stimulate collaboration across disciplines and to find inspiration.

Illustration

2011-09-26T23:33:00Z

This is our illustration for today’s Bloomberg News opinion piece on cellphone network censorship... Worth reading.

Groundbreaking

2011-05-24T16:39:00Z

Congratulations to the Whitney on the groundbreaking for their new building today! We were excited to see this special one-day homepage on whitney.org – made in Economy without even telling us! We always love it when our clients make things we didn’t plan for using our tools.

Speaking of fish

2011-05-12T12:32:00Z

Working on our new aquarium (have you checked back? they are growing nicely…) reminded us of this collaboration with Paul Elliman from a few years ago, a proposal for an identity for the Vincent Award.

Another fish screensaver

2011-05-09T04:00:00Z

Most of our work is processes that develop over time. There is the process of developing a design, but also the life of a design after the project “launches.” When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn’t imagine after we “release” it. Even though this is the most natural condition in the world, we’re fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop. We symbolized this with the sunset on the Whitney, the changing colors of Making Policy Public, and the most recently visited building photos on the Yale map, to name a few.

Check out our new contribution for Parallelograms, and be sure to check back periodically!

Love the future

2011-04-09T20:47:00Z

This new site helps organize information about the political imprisonment this week of artist Ai Weiwei. Built in collaboration with our friends at ArtAsiaPacific and elsewhere.

Please spread the word: Tweet<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <iframe allowtransparency="true" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Ffreeaiweiwei.org&layout=button_count&show_faces=true&width=80&action=like&font=arial&colorscheme=light&height=25" frameborder="0" style="position: relative; top: 1px; left: -8px; margin-bottom: -4px; border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:25px;" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Thanks Laurel!

Update: Lisson Gallery in London puts up a banner on its facade with a link to our site for more information, as Ai Weiwei’s work goes on display…

ArtAsiaPacific

2011-03-18T22:38:00Z

We’re really excited about the launch of ArtAsiaPacific’s new site, the online version of an English-language magazine that covers contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. As a magazine, the site is optimized for reading on the iPad and iPhone as well as regular computers, including “next” and “previous” buttons that always take you to the next thing to read. To make the content more accessible to the same readers who might not be able to purchase the printed version, we made many articles available through the website in Arabic and Chinese. The site also features an online store, an area for web-specific projects commissioned by the magazine, a lively blog, and an interactive almanac. Since the launch, staff have already published two new issues through the new system (the fifth Economy site), and have been using the site in creative ways. More images

Organizations recommended by AAP for Japan relief donations

Membership integration

2011-03-17T20:07:00Z

For about the past year, we’ve been working with the Whitney on a project to integrate their website with their membership system, Raiser’s Edge. This was a complex three-way project that involved collaboration with the developers of Raiser’s Edge and the creation of new behind-the-scenes web services, and it launched today. As a result, users of whitney.org can now manage their museum membership online, and see a reminder at the top of each webpage when their membership is about to expire. In calendars throughout the site, users see a “For you” badge on special events for their membership level (a feature that nicely complements the Curate Your Own Membership project and the “your collection” feature of the website), and even users who aren’t members of the museum can customize their calendars on the website to highlight events in categories that interest them. The Whitney can also now show any content on whitney.org conditionally to particular users, such as an announcement or solicitation targeted to users in a particular membership category. Congratulations Bridget and everyone who worked on this project so steadily!

Watch & Listen

2011-02-08T15:38:00Z

The Whitney has just re-launched its Watch & Listen area, a redesign we’ve been immersed in for some time. Have a look around, the content is pretty addictive. Everything is inter-linked, tagged, and sharable, and podcasts and downloads are available. It works on your iPhone too. A neat feature is the ability to quickly make your own playlists. This feature is integrated with making other kinds of collections on the site (artworks, events, etc.). Thanks Brian!

Another happy Economy training

2011-02-01T19:13:00Z

At ArtAsiaPacific.

Brand New School

2011-01-07T21:19:00Z

We launched a new site for the production company and design studio, Brand New School. We’re excited that it’s the fourth installation of our modular content management system, Economy – the first three being the Yale School of Art, the Environmental Performance Index, and the Whitney Museum. It’s fun to compare the 1 2 3 4.

A central metaphor for this new site is an infinite set of shelves that holds both finished projects and bits of inspirations and creative expressions that can be uploaded by all BNS employees. In addition, all visitors to the site can re-edit BNS reels and start their own reels, using the same easy-to-use tool we developed for BNS to share custom reels with their clients. Read more...

BNS staff can change the backgrounds of the site, at any time.

Our CMS, Economy, allowed Brand New School to develop project pages that often vary greatly from one project to the next, showing each project according to its own needs. This also helps communicate Brand New School’s emphasis on design.

Economy’s easy to use page creating and editing interface.

Bits contributed by anyone at BNS can show inspirations, unfinished ideas, characters, snippets of a larger project, etc.

The reels feature allows any visitor to the site to collect BNS work and build reels with different themes. You can copy existing BNS reels as a starting point. All the reels shown on the site are built using this same tool, which we developed custom for BNS, and BNS staff will also use it to create on-demand reels for prospective clients.

Over a year of working together, we had a great collaboration with BNS. We think the new site really feels like both of us.

Additional programming: Graybits. Thanks Brana!

Easter egg by Laurel: http://brandnewschool.com?spinner=ghost