the Interaction Consortium

Art Gallery of New South Wales

CLIENT/ Art Gallery of NSW

OUR ROLE/ Strategic Consultancy, Information Architecture, Technical Architecture, Interaction Design, Development, Systems Administration, Maintenance

CHALLENGE/ The Art Gallery of NSW is a grand, popular institution, and requires a bold, high-performance site. Our challenge was to build just such a showcase for the AGNSW collection; robust, secure, accessible, standards-compliant, and customised to the unique needs of the Gallery. The design placed heavy focus on graphical elements and bringing the Gallery’s rich content to every aspect of the site. Our goal was to support this design.

APPROACH/ It was important that the CMS allow quick and easy updating, and that it make full use of the strong and confident designs produced by the Gallery. For this we chose Django, and designed a system to manage image and video assets in accordance with the Gallery's desired workflows.

RESULT/ The new site synchronises with the Gallery’s collection database, which increases the accessibility of the collection, and includes interfaces for the Gallery's specialisation in Aboriginal and Asian art. The new system also represents a vast improvement in SEO and the reuse of content across the site.

"We partnered with Interaction Consortium to take our online collection and general web presence to the next level. The team listened to what our complex needs were and delivered a bespoke content management framework that allows us the flexibility we need to evolve our web presence going forward." John Wicks, Assistant Director, Finance & Resources, Art Gallery of NSW.

National Film and Sound Archive

CLIENT/ National Film and Sound Archive

OUR ROLE/ Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Development, Systems Administration, Maintenance

CHALLENGE/ The National Film and Sound Archive is an extensive organisation with many points of engagement with the public, and requires that its website meets the needs of film researchers and production assistants, teachers and film clubs, filmmakers and the owners of valuable historical film and sound material.

APPROACH/ The NFSA were familiar with our work on the Australian Screen website—which we had built with a very structured approach to content management and web publishing—and were keen to bring this approach to the NFSA corporate site. However, they also required the flexibility to create web structures of a more organic nature. For this, we used the Django framework to develop a system called 'lumpypages' which defines a structured hierarchy of web pages with an auto-generating navigation system. We also synchronised the collection database with Django, to connect the collection content with other parts of the site and cross-reference with the Australian Screen site.

RESULT/ The new NFSA site has a much more consistent navigational structure imposed by the content management system, making it easier to use and maintain. The new system gives content editors the ability to bring the freshest content to the pages with the highest traffic and to update content with ease.

Go Play

CLIENT/ The Powerhouse Museum

SITE/ Go Play

OUR ROLE/ Development

CHALLENGE/ To create a calendar of free and affordable kids' events run by the NSW Government in the school holidays. The concept for the project came Ronit Olovitz’s award-winning idea for Apps4NSW.

APPROACH/ We were responsible for front- and back-end development; we built the site in Django, and drew on and developed our open-source GLAMkit event tools.

RESULT/ A comprehensive activity-planning tool for parents, which can be customised by administrators at every level of content.

FUTURE PLANS/ To expand the site into a year-round planner.

SBS streaming audio player

We were recently commissioned by SBS (Australia's national broadcaster of multicultural and multilingual programming) to build a Flash application to function as an audio player.

The audio player was originally limited to MP3 file playback from the SBS servers, but the latest iteration handles live and on-demand streaming from Akamai and Limelight servers, the two content distribution networks SBS uses. SBS are still in the process of configuring their streaming, such that the latest iteration is yet to be used on their website. The player reports usage to the SBS web analytics system, was built using Flex to the client’s design, and can be recoloured live for different sections of the SBS site.

About NSW

About New South Wales is an interactive encyclopedia of the Australian state, visualising the data collections of a number of cultural and government institutions.

We were involved at many levels of the project's design and execution. One significant example is the development of a real-time interactive choropleth (a coloured map), which shows the patterns in NSW census statistics to varied levels of detail. This project represents the first use of this real-time choropleth technology on the web.

Australian Screen

We have a long history of working with the NFSA on its sites, including Australian Screen Online (ASO), the NFSA.gov.au site and its Digital Learning portal. ASO brings together the vast collections of the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Archives of Australia,ABC, SBS, and AIATSIS in a unique collaboration. ASO is a long-term web project and the definitive guide to Australia's audiovisual heritage.

ASO is a Django development, and the latest version, with a new social section, iPhone compatible videos and new graphic design was recently launched. These features were added to the site’s existing Django code, illustrating the ease with which Django sites can be extended and enhanced. We also recently launched a full mobile version of the site, including mobile geo-search.

Lexus

CLIENT/ The White Agency

SITE/ Lexus Australia

OUR ROLE/ UX Design, Interaction Design

CHALLENGE/ To improve the user experience of the Lexus website—to align the online experience of the brand with its broader ideals and wider digital strategy. This meant identifying the needs of the key user personas and the ways in which the website could respond to them.

APPROACH/ Working from The White Agency’s research and benchmarks, and in collaboration with their production team, we worked to improve the experience of key brand touch-points such as the configuration and comparison tools.

RESULT/ A 28% increase in natural search traffic from November 2009 to June 2010, an increase in Google crawl stats by a factor of 2.5, and an increase in search engine visibility by a factor of 10.

Arts NSW Cultural Facilities Directory

CLIENT/ Arts NSW

SITE/ Arts NSW Cultural Facilities Directory

OUR ROLE/ Design, Interaction Design, Development

CHALLENGE/ To build an online directory of publicly-owned cultural facilities in NSW; galleries, museums, performing arts centres, and community halls available for professional arts practice. The directory is intended for use by the NSW community—to locate venues and to access specifications and booking information, and as a portal to activities held across the state.

APPROACH/ We built the directory in Django, which allowed us to make use of existing open-source libraries, and because of the seamless communication between python and Django, to import the images and plans for the hundreds of facilities with which the directory launched.

RESULT/ An extensive database of cultural facilities in NSW, which can be searched by a number of filters and browsed via an interactive map.

FUTURE PLANS/ To open the directory to privately owned facilities, and to create new ways to browse the data.

ABC Pool

Pool is a collaborative community space, an innovative blend of social media and broadcast material. The ABC terms the site an 'online town square for all Australians'; a place for the audience to create their own profiles, post about their creative pursuits, and download and remix multimedia content from the ABC archive. Pool also serves as a platform for the audience to upload their own work, download the work of others, and collaborate with Radio National producers on a range of projects.

We consulted on the Drupal configuration and integration, and implemented the graphic design in standards-compliant CSS.

History of the Australian Web

The History of the Australian Web is a visualisation of Internet usage in Australia between 2001 and 2008. An interactive animation presents the Nielsen figures for the top 100 websites, tracking their fortunes over time and allowing for an exploration of different aspects of the data.

Vivid Sydney

Vivid Sydney (2009) was the parent site of four Sydney festivals: Luminous at the Opera House, Smart Light Sydney, Fire Water, and the Creative Sydney conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The front-end of the site was technically ambitious (animated Flash background, sIFR typography and extensive lightbox javascript), but worked in all modern browsers, and IE6. On the back-end, we built a customised CMS for handling and ordering events (which occurred on multiple dates and times).

Vivacity09

Vivacity Sydney is a showcase for a number of cultural events (such as the Sydney Festival, the New Year's Eve celebrations and Australia Day) which take place in January of each year.

Vivacity09 featured a photography competition, for which we used the Flickr API to upload and share photos. We also used the Akismet API for spam prevention, and jQuery for the gracefully-degrading Javascript.

The site was promoted throughout Sydney, and made a 2009 Webby Award Honoree in the Events category. This honour signifies an outstanding caliber of work.

The Archibald Prize 2010

We launched the site for the Archibald Prize 2010 on March 17 – the day the finalists for the Archibald and associated Wynne and Sulman prizes were announced (also on the Archibald site).

The Archibald Prize is an immensely popular annual art award administered by the Art Gallery of NSW, and has enjoyed a great deal of publicity in its 89 years. The Archibald has a reputation for inciting controversy and debate – on the purpose of art and the nature of portraiture – and for evoking considerable public interest in modern artists and their work.

This translates to a large number of visitors to the present website, which, like all of our particularly-demanding websites, we made with Django. Specifically, it's our first site built primarily with the GLAMkit framework - an open source Django-based framework from developing sites in the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector.

Toben

Toben is a creative studio committed to inspired, thoughtful design, and we recently had the pleasure of making their new website.

The site has a Flash-based front-end supported by a Django back-end and admin site. The front-end has a fairly unique horizontal scrolling-based interface, with column-based ‘news’ and ‘about’ sections, and a gallery-like ‘showcase’ section. The latter additionally required the development of custom image management and sorting tools in the site admin. The front-end includes a bona fide plethora of subfeatures, including customised video playback controls, background resource loading, an intricate custom pre-loader, and browser history synchronisation.

Green Buildings Alive

CLIENT/ Investa Sustainability Institute

SITE/ Green Buildings Alive

OUR ROLE/ Design, Interaction Design, Development

CHALLENGE/ The website design and build for Green Buildings Alive, an initiative of the Investa Sustainability Institute. To connect people with the work of the sustainability group; to encourage participation and build awareness of the ways data can be used to elucidate problems and solutions.

APPROACH/ The website is essentially a blog, but with the use of Django, we were able to define and control the content to the Institute’s specifications, and with Fein CMS, to increase the flexibility with which content can be managed.

RESULT/ A space for the communication of data and insights between and among ISI and the community, complete with an interactive data analysis tool—the Building Datalyzer, which we created as part of another initiative from ISI and integrated into the Green Buildings Alive site.

IFACCA

With national member organisations in 72 countries, the website for the International Federation of Art Councils and Culture Agencies serves as a gateway to arts councils and culture ministries right across the world.

We were commissioned to port the whole of the site from Joomla into Django, and to implement the new graphic design.

"IFACCA has worked closely with members of the team at the Interaction Consortium since 2006. They have consistently provided highly professional website development and database management expertise. While our remit is global, our organisation and resource base is small – the IxC has proved invaluable in helping us to efficiently introduce new functionalities to our website that significantly improve our communications and services." Karilyn Brown, General Manager, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies.

The Red Room Company

In 2008, Thomas Ashelford and his company Ether began work on a series of websites for The Red Room Company, a nonprofit organisation with the stated purpose to ‘create, promote and publish new poetry by Australian writers, in unusual ways.’ Their ideas are whimsical (think poems strapped to the legs of racing pigeons, a treasure hunt for the words of poet truckies..), and yet they have the know-how to turn each idea into something real (but not without a sense of magic).

The sites for the Red Room Company, Pigeon Poetry and Dust Poems were each built in Django, at the intersection of poetry and a classic, data-driven approach to web design.

Thingalyzer

Thingalyzer is a Web application designed to collate, associate and explore lists of everyone’s favourite things. The application uses Yahoo Pipes and YQL to integrate a number of Web services into its 'Thingalysis' of the data.

Thingalyzer was designed for interoperation with Artefact H10515, an interactive sculpture at the Powerhouse Museum. It does however function as an independent application, and has been sidelined for use in the creation of future art projects.