The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

Launched Jan, 2009

ICATeens.org

The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

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Designing the Interface

The Goals

We originally teamed up with ICA Teens to help craft a user experience that effectively connected with its primary user base, teen artists. The design concept needed to adhere to ICA’s branding guidlines, but also needed to express the frenetic energy of its teen programs.
Additionally, beyond creating a compelling look and feel for the initial launch, we were asked to contstruct a visual framework that would allow for frequent design updates by teen artists in the future.

The Solution

Throughout the design process, we engaged a wide group for participation and feedback, icluding staff, students, and student leadership at ICA Teens. Once goals were distilled from hefty responses to early surveys and interviews, we proposed a website architecture. After some iteration on wireframes, we went to work designing the look and feel for the website, working with ICA Teens to visually interpret the essense of its mission and programs for the web.

The resulting design showcases teen artists’ work in a series of interactive online galleries, incorporates themes from ICA Teens programs and publications, and provides a simple, CSS-driven approach for creating future variations to the overall look and feel.

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Built with Drupal

Seeking robust content management capabilites, fine-tuned permissions control, and a flexible application development environment, ICA Teens chose Drupal as the platform for deploying icateens.org. We installed Drupal 6 and a wide range of contributed modules, then configured a prototype with baseline functionlality for necessary features. From there, we fine-tuned technical components through iterative revisions based on client participation and feedback.

Technical features included:

• Interactive art galleries, created with Flash, that pull video, images, and text from both local and third-party data sources.
• A custom Views 2 style plugin for serving Drupal content to Flash galleries using serialized arrays.
• Custom content types for defining theme variations, without requiring additional CSS or HTML, and publishing them for specific sections of the website.
• Workflow and reporting for class registration.
• Customized user profile pages.
• Granular permissions for controlling how content is published — and accessible — throughout the website.

Evolving Product

The production effort for ICATeens.org has followed a “Release Early, Release Often” development model. New features and content continue to be deployed on a regular basis, with a continued focus on empowering user participation at ICA Teens.