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Boundless Explorations-

designing archive as a self-learning tool

Design Challenge- How can archive work as a learning and knowledge sharing tool instead of a dead information repository?

Through this project, I explore ways of designing an archive that can function as a tool for self-learning and knowledge sharing. I have designed a digital archive of the graduation projects of Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology.

1.GayatriChudekar_Boundless Explorations

Objectives
• Conceptualizing archive that can work as a self-learning tool.
• Organising category structure for the graduation projects.
• Presentation of projects as stories & experiences

• Devise activities or Exercises that promote self-learning through archival material
• Creating Information Architecture
• Suitable UI design

Understanding the Context

An Institute is the plethora of information. It is accessed through direct and indirect encounters with those who
create and share the information. The information created within the institute is of immense value to the Srishti
community. Students culminate their journey at Srishti with their capstone project. They apply the learnings and
understandings they have gained through their respective courses. This itself is a pool of knowledge created by students within the Srishti community. This information remains bound in the yearbooks and is displayed only once in the
year. It should be made easily available and accessible within and beyond the Srishti community.

Often Archives are treated as a dead repository of information. The immense potential of the way it can work as a learning tool is lost due to the way it is constructed and communicated. Hence, there is need of designing an archive for knowledge sharing which also works as a learning tool.

Stakeholder mapping

Understanding the Community- User Research

After stakeholder mapping, there was a need to gather enough insights before creating the archive. To understand the stakeholders’ needs, expectations, and behaviour, I conducted multiple face-to-face interviews. As I was a student myself I also used the autoethnographic approach to inform my design. Various user qualitative, quantitative and art-based research activities were conducted and analysed to get actionable insights.

Information gathered through these research activities were analysed by creating affinity maps, user journey maps and task flow analysis.

Insights that came out of it were that each one had a unique Information seeking behaviour, information categorising structures and information navigation. These factors were influenced by their background, course taken, mental and emotional states.

Understanding the Content- data

Surveying the content to be archived and interacting with the community prompted a need for a unique structure of categorization. Work at Srishti shows a transdisciplinary approach, research-based inquiries and emergence of socially
&ecologically responsible, self-reflective projects. Hence, the projects done within the institute cannot be adequately categorized into available commercial categories that are mostly output based.

Themes emerging from the studied projects were mapped and grouped into categories. New categories were defined based on this approach.

Conceptualizing archive that can work as a self-learning tool

Any content source site will have overwhelming information. Hence, it is important to provide visual cues for seamless navigation , include learning activities and build simple information architecture.

Navigation structure

through user research, it was clear that when a user is will visit the site,

they could either

─ Know exactly where to go and what to look for
─ Is there to explore different projects
─ Is confused
─ Is overwhelmed by the excess of information

Accordingly, Separate entry points are provided to the same content.

Learning Activities

Analysis of this user activity highlighted that for users to be able to learn from the projects, they should be able to compare and make new connections after viewing different projects. These newly formed connections act as an inspiration to create new knowledge from the existing knowledge and finally contribute to the archive, hence
completing the data cycle.

Hence, the activities listed were based on – studying and comparing projects, design inspiration, thinking & learning

Presenting projects as experience narratives

When this information is to be digitized, it is suddenly made available to mass viewing, sparking questions of data privacy, plagiarism and privacy rights. A project information structure for the digital archive should not be detailed enough to make the uploader uncomfortable to share their work but be specific enough to give a fair overview of the project without being overwhelming. The prior user interactions and research also demanded the project page structure to have a narrative tone. It was important to give users a peek into the journey of the project, challenges faced and reflection of the maker than just the output or product. A project page information structure was designed to address these concerns.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture was devised based on research analysis and defined task flows.

Mapping User task flows

Task flows were mapped for main user tasks like 1. user sign up, 2. Uploading project, 3. Taking learning activities 4. exploring projects through different entry points