Smithsonian Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation
Telling the Stories of Great Visionaries: The Lemelson Center’s Digital Reinvention
Located within the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation shares the history of invention in America and inspires people to use the imaginative, creative process of invention to improve their everyday lives. By providing educational activities, museum exhibits, historical research, and public programming, the Center aims to engage, educate, and empower a diverse audience, helping them to see themselves as inventors.
Serving as the repository for the Lemelson Center’s extensive research, the website suffered from not only haphazard content organization but also a lack of inspiration and engagement. Plus, with Drupal 7 end of life approaching, it needed to be rebuilt in Drupal 10.
Organized Architecture and Improved Content Management
The Lemelson Center’s depth and breadth of research was certainly a robust backbone for the previous website. However, the cumbersome and complex site architecture paired with ineffective categorization, filtering, and search functions made navigation tedious.
To begin the redesign, we hosted a series of interviews to better understand the Center’s initiatives and goals. From there, we used those findings to generate messaging pillars and a more user-friendly information architecture. We simplified the expansive topics and themes into an intuitive and searchable hierarchy of categories, such as science, power, arts, and technology.
Technically speaking, we used Drupal’s migration system to seamlessly haul more than 1,000 pieces of content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. And updating content is made simple for their web team thanks to Mercury Editor, Aten’s drag-and-drop Drupal publisher.
Inspiring Design & Inclusive Imagery
The website was the core representation of the Lemelson Center’s identity and experiences. Typically, users could find the website through online academic research or by participating in an in-person Spark!Lab activity at the National Museum of American History. To help and delight users, we knew that a refreshed look for the brand was in store. We kicked off the design phase with a workshop to understand the Center’s identity and set the tone for the design.
We arrived on a design theme that supports the idea “Invention is born of creativity and curiosity.” So to inspire inventiveness among site visitors, we created a playful hand-drawn look. In addition to the colorful iconography we layered the look with original drawings from the organization’s founder, Jerry Lemelson, a prolific inventor who held more than 600 patents.
Lemelson Center also wanted to inspire site visitors to see themselves as inventors. We ensured the site’s blog, Invention Stories, showcased diverse biographies, inventions, topics, and more to help all visitors relate to the wonderful, creative process of invention.
Unified Digital and In-Person Experiences
To help site visitors connect the digital world to the Lemelson Center’s museum experience, we borrowed tactics from the museum encounter. For example, both the site and museum exhibits regularly feature query prompts—such as “How might you approach this challenge?”—to stimulate further engagement. Plus, a section outlining invention-related activities visitors could try at home as well as an online event calendar further cemented the bond between the museum and digital worlds.
Smithsonian Regulations
Our developers collaborated with Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer to host the site after it was built, whose process requires extensive security clearances from our staff.
The Institution also has very robust digital accessibility standards that require the site to pass strict manual and automated testing prior to launch. We were able to maintain accessibility throughout the design and development processes with the help of Aten’s in-house Accessibility & QA Lead.
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