The New School

Multimedia Content Library
Project Lead (Project Management, UI/UX Design, IA, Front End Development)

I currently work at The New School where I manage several college website as well as design new features and functionality for the university. Recently, I designed a dynamic video, audio, and photo delivery system for the university - all content can be shared/published across its eight colleges, as well. Additionally, I will be building an iTunes U channel to host and promote the same content.

Above is a tabbed javascript/Flash gallery that interfaces with the photosharing website, Flickr. Visit The New School’s Flickr page to see how the content appears outside the university context. Our video content is hosted by Blip.tv and audio will be hosted by Soundcloud (as soon as they’re open to the public).

Web 2.0/Social Strategy

The New School’s CMS currently does not offer social networking capabilities. Furthermore, the university is not yet ready to delve into community management on the web. We also don’t have a lot of hosting space for rich media on our servers. In come Web 2.0 services: Flickr and other web hosting services offer The New School a web2.0-licious public presence as well as a public API with which we can develop unique applications for our websites. In other words, we don’t need a team of programmers to develop cool things…we can mooch off of what the fine folks at Yahoo/Flickr have already developed and tweak to our needs.

And a great biproduct is that we can tap into existing social networks to distribute content and communicate with users. As far as universities go, while people still turn to official websites for information, their decisions can also be affected by what kind of presence the university has across the web. So if the website that houses our snapshots also taps into a huge social network of engaged users, all the better.

UX Design

The backend for this system acts as a university-wide multimedia content library. I designed it so that content editors could add/edit content centrally through our CMS and syndicate content throughout The New School’s college websites. Here is how a similar content offering looks when it is published on Eugene Lang College’s website:

or embedded on the Jazz school’s homepage: