 I want to introduce our third and final speaker of the series, Dan Michelson. Dan Michelson is a founding partner, creative director and technical lead at Linked By Air. Prior to founding Linked By Air, Dan was a designer at 2x4 and Pentagram. He holds an MFA degree in graphic design from Yale School of Art and a degree in American history from Columbia University. Dan teaches the interaction design and thesis studio courses in Yale's graduate graphic design department. Linked By Air is a designer of the Columbia GSAP and Yale School of Art website. The popular drawing app Shrub and the websites of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Jumex, Printed Matter, ICALA and other cultural institutions. So I know that you've all been very excited about the launch of the GSAP website that you know and love and reference every day. So we'll get to hear a little bit more about the story behind how that came to be. Dan's studio is also working on the new website for Yale School of Art, which she won't show, but it's actually launching in February. So look out for that project as well. Okay, thanks. Thanks. So I wanted to sort of talk about living archives today in a few different ways. And our studio does a lot of work, as you mentioned, with museums and cultural institutions, schools like this one and the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Art. And so a lot of our work in a number of different ways sort of deals with creating archives, whether it's a permanent collection of art at a museum or things that students make at a school or the courses at a school. And at the same time, we're really invested in thinking about time. And so when you think about an archive, it's both a database set of things, but it's also something that's growing over time and that represents a history, a moving needle across an axis of time. I'm going to start one way that I sometimes illustrate this idea is here at the International Space Station. This is certainly not our work. The tether from the Be'u, the radio scaffold. Okay, I understand. We unsecure it from the suit and then we attach the tether remains on the Be'u. That's correct, you leave the tether. I understand. You have to try and push it at least half a meter per second against the motion. Valeri, you can release the tether and you can secure the tether on the station. We're getting the picture. Goodbye. Mr Smith, yeah, we can see. And there was the deployment of Suitsat flying away at 502 p.m. Central Times, Suitsat on its way, heading into an innovative and solitary orbit around the earth. Yeah, it's moving at a specified acceleration. We can see the satellite from the ground. Wonderful picture, Valeri. Thank you very much. Suitsat having been deployed over the South Central Pacific Ocean at 502 p.m. Central Time. A scene reminiscent of science fiction movies that have depicted stranded astronauts floating away from their spacecraft. Suitsat begins its journey filled with ham radio equipment to transmit messages and slow-scan digital TV pictures to ham enthusiasts and students around the world. The Trajectory Operations Officer here on Mission Control reports a good deploy within the cone for safety to ensure no recontact with the International Space Station. So it's a kind of very elaborate joke in a way, this really low budget satellite built from an empty space suit. And you can sort of hear how difficult it was and even how some level of danger and the exertion that these astronauts are working through to push this thing safely out of the airlock. This is Suitsat one, amateur radio station. I am here. So Suitsat contained broadcasting equipment and it broadcast a radio signal as it orbited the earth. And that contained greetings in many languages and like telemetry information and the state of its own battery and its temperature. And as people on earth observed these radio transmissions overhead they would contribute them to this online map so that this kind of trajectory of motion and this sort of elaborate science fiction vignette are turned into a map and a database and archive of observations. One of the things I really like about Suitsat's grammar is that that static that you can hear going in and out in those audio recordings is a trace of Suitsat tumbling head over heels. So you can hear this human body kind of flipping over and over and over as it orbits the earth, as the antenna points towards the earth and points away from the earth. You get different inflections in its voice and to some extent those are captured in this database and this map and to some extent not so much. And of course these observations can be represented in different ways as a map, as a database and the qualities are also recorded as well what you heard and how it sounded. So one of the things I'm going to be sort of coming back to a few times is sort of the relationship between things that you experience in the moment like an active speech or something that's tumbling head over heels or something that feels nostalgic or like sci-fi and trying to capture those things into a database into an archive and an archive that's always growing. Sort of take a step back and start at the beginning for Linked By Air. This was our first studio at the moment when we moved in on on East Broadway in a lower East or Chinatown and that's my partner, Tamara. This was in 2005. Out the window we really liked sort of all the movement on East Broadway. It's kind of one of the most amazing streets in Manhattan and I've always like this this sort of early photo from our own archive of sort of information moving by kind of on the network of New York streets. One of our first projects that we worked on as a studio was the website for the Yale School of Art and one thing that I'm sort of also thinking about you guys as architects and students who are working on a body of work, working on an approach to practice and also maybe thinking about a portfolio, how do you represent that work and is that a finished thing now or is it continually growing and evolving and like you do with respect to your own work we had a very intimate and first person perspective on the School of Art when we were asked to work on this website. We had been students there. I was in the faculty there at the time and I still am and so we knew that that was a place that like GSTAP is changing every day. There's always new work in the halls. The studios are always different. The students moving through are always new and so there should be a website that also is as dynamic as that and changed all the time. Unlike GSTAP there was no communication staff at the School of Art. It's a much smaller school and so it would be sort of impossible to engineer a website that would be different every day unless we realized we exploited the students who were super talented and creative people to change the website all the time. So we proposed to the administration that that we would build a system that allowed all the student staff and faculty at the school to edit every page of the site and to add new pages all the time. One of the ways we sort of incentivize students to do that was by putting the calendar really prominently on the home page and to some extent that's a quality of GSTAP site as well so that students who are trying to want to know what's happening at the school will make this page their home page. It will come back to it all the time then we'll be dissatisfied with it and we'll want to improve it. By now 12 years later the site is still running. It's gone through lots of crazy phases. It's consisted of 3,700 pages by now. There are 51,000 versions of those pages that have been worked on by 828 different student staff and faculty. The home page alone has been edited 7,400 times and against that about three and a half million different people have viewed those pages 19 million times. So it's a substantial archive now of one access of production by really talented student artists. It's still growing. It's still in flux and it still feels new. The way that we made this possible was by designing a grammar, a kit of parts. It was important that the system that you would use to edit the site be easy enough for students to use without any training and also that it be modular partly for ease of use so that the design wouldn't totally break as different people used it but also so that we could protect parts of pages. We wanted students to be able to edit the admissions pages. We could not let students change the tuition or change faculty bias. We thought about it as making sure that there were no locked doors in the site but that there could be locked file cabinets. That's part of being a responsible institution or organization. So these are some drawings of the grammar of this site. I see this as an analogous to the grammar of that suit set tumbling head over heels in a way. These are the parts of speech for the Yale School of Art site as it has grown over 12 years and been recorded and used by lots of people during that time. These pieces can be rearranged in any order on all pages. This is the content management system that we developed at Linked By Air to make this possible. This system is called Economy because it's a platform for exchange or a system that grows and deals in the trade of information. To make a page in economy you can start with a blank slate, click in the crack, choose what kind of content you want to make and you saw what those modules look like for the School of Art. They look different for GSAP and you have different choices at GSAP that the School of Art has. That choice leads to questions like what's the title and what's the content of this text module, or what's the image and what's the caption in this image module. You can then click in the crack between two more things, keep inserting content, rearrange it and so on. These were the pages that the School launched with and one way that you can also get a sense of the quality of time going by is in the browser chrome of these very professional screenshots. This in a sense is what the site was meant to look like. These pages were built by us, a feature of it that's sort of forgotten for a number of reasons, I mean this is a weird tangent, but is the stripe that goes down the middle and students can edit the background of every page and can say what do they want this part to be, what do they want this part to be, and what do they want the stripe to be, but they can't move the stripe and they can make the stripe not be there but if it's there this is where it is and you could change what color that is or what pattern is in the stripe but you can't move it and so that's the sort of very loose visual identity that's on the site in a way. That kind of got lost over the years and I always thought that it was because we sort of weren't teaching students how to use it and so nobody was sort of populating that part of the background module as the years went by. It turned out that there was a CSS bug actually so over the years browsers no longer rendered it successfully so we brought it back recently but it's actually sort of an interesting example of how culture and technology sort of intertwine to create change both intentional and unintentional over the years. These are pages that were built after the launch and the 12 years after lots of home pages, faculty pages. This system sort of functions as group ware so students can collaborate through the site to work on projects together. For a period of time students tended to sort of launch quasi-official bureaus of the school. The department of anthology was a bootleg film series. A number of students kind of started office hours. A really successful and great game design class was started just through the website when Jeffrey Scudder just gave it a course number. Student pages sometimes the site in a way is a surface for art on its own in a sense rather than or it functions I can as a documentation or portfolio of art. Of course lots of things can go wrong with a system like that. One day the site was down and as we tracked down the reason why it was down it was because it had been nominated as the suckiest website of the year 2010 on websites.suck.com and by that it also won awards for great graphic design as well. Then as a result it was featured on Reddit the traffic crashed the site. We had to explain that to the administration. They took it super well. But there's a great thread on Reddit. I'll bet Yle's art department has an awesome looking site. Wait what? At some point someone points out hey it's a wiki that the site changes all the time. It's not bad design. It's bad content. The response is a really useful one. Now we know it's not a good idea. It's true that we try to design for outcomes in a way. We're trying to set a system in motion that hopefully will be healthy over the years and you can judge it either by the system that we release or by the kit of parts or by how it turns out. I do think it was a good idea. For what it's worth it's the site is sometimes great sometimes bad. It often looks like the work of the students at the school of art which presumably many commentators on Reddit also would not like. But we just went through admissions at Yale and it's not uncommon for people to say that they applied to the school because of the website or that immediately they knew what kind of place it was. This content management system we use subsequently from many other institutions. Here's a snapshot of GSAP and you can see how it also forms a database of pages. One of the things it does is track trends in viewership. These are some of the other sites we've built with it. Print and Matters website, the artist book store, Tang Museum, the Manil Collection, the Aspen Art Museum, the Whitney Museum. Showing is real one of the things we like to focus on is context in a sense. We're creating a set of possibilities but authors and institutions are going to activate those possibilities based on their own context and what their own environments are like and what's happening at the school or at the museum from week to week. As a design process sort of immersing ourselves in those contexts at the beginning of a project is a really important part of our process to understand what a place is like so that we can develop a language that's appropriate to that place. Another living archive from a similar period for us was this was the graduating exhibition of the graphic design students at the Yale School of Art in 2006 and I was teaching a class in that year and in that year students decided to represent all of their work as eight and a half by 11 inch color printouts and so it made this kind of really spectacular space in this huge gallery cube and to do that they started with what you could call a database or a model, a very sophisticated architectural maquette and there was sort of simple math involved. We could count the number of pixels that were in the space and divide it by 18 students. Each student then had a particular number of pixels and they could decide how they what the disposition of those pixels should be so if one student's work related thematically to another student's work maybe they would situate themselves next to each other or comb into each other. Some students made sort of one grand gesture in one area of the space other students kind of distributed themselves like salt all around the space and so that sort of process of negotiation needs a database like this one in a sense it needs a way to sort of plan from the top down where everything goes but at the same time that exhibition is a time-based process so we had five days to mount it and so there's also math involved in figuring out how much of this of the gallery would we be able to cover in that time and also what did our how much could our tiny budget afford and so there are actually three rooms in the art schools gallery and so we timed sort of how fast this this printer is this gantry that we built that moves across the walls as someone stands on top and puts the sheets of paper up with shiny sticky tape and from that we knew that we could cover that entire huge bottom space and also the middle level which we turned into a paper movie theater which students turned into a paper movie theater it's actually sort of a really slow space and it was an actual sort of a really slow space in a funny way when you sort of looked at it from from above it's this kind of huge gesture but when you were in it there's so much detail that you really kind of got lost in it but we knew from the beginning that we did not have the time to cover the upper level and so instead that was a huge sign that said welcome and pointed you down the stairs and of course once you set up a system like that just like with the school of art website the rest of the choices sort of make themselves so how do you make the sign of course you make it out of paper which is then naturally backlit from from inside so in the very in the front sort of antechamber the hero of the exhibition so we use that same CMS to build a Whitney's website a few years later and you can sort of see how that system is built of these same kinds of modules as the school of art website even though the modules themselves are different and our our thought was that the the Whitney engages in lots of different kinds of activities which is sort of underappreciated that it both has a great permanent collection and great contemporary exhibitions but also really good educational programming and and for adults and for kids for example and so we built a system that would allow like 50 different staff at the Whitney to sort of rearrange that story from week to week and month to month and year to year that website was white in the day and black at night and at the moment of sunset New York City time we got the Whitney to commission a series of of artist interventions one per season that would that would be the sunset and so everybody on the site at that time would see the transition for 30 seconds as as depicted by a different artist every season and so like with the suit set the Whitney's website is this kind of collection of rearranged modules that's changing all the time but it's also observed at particular times and what's really nice about seeing the sunset and that's something that you can still do actually if you go to whitney.org at the moment of of astronomical sunset in New York City you will see something cool for 30 seconds and you realize at that time A I should like look out the window it's actually a sunset and B and or like stop programming for a second in my case and B everybody else is seeing this too so using the web can be this kind of solitary experience but at this moment you realize that there's other people doing the same thing. This also happens in New York City time to emphasize the Whitney as a New York institution so if you're looking at the site from from another time zone or from overseas you you kind of get a sense of the rhythm of our city here you see sort of the homepage as it usually was one day we checked out the site and the Whitney's designers the Whitney's in-house team had used our system to radically redesign the homepage in preparation for the biennial using this kind of set the system of tools that we had given them just like with the school of art we were really interested in sort of how the system was being used by its by its authors and of course with the Whitney it's not editable by everybody in the world it's editable just by staff and and so we sort of figured out how to get this kind of 30 000 foot view of of how the system grew so I believe this is before the launch this is us and Whitney staff working on pages populating the database arranging modules starting from one page at the beginning the login page through the launch at this particular moment which is like a minor moment and then the site continues to evolve and iterate for the years after that and just like your work does sort of another layer of change in 2013 the Whitney moved from its uptown location to its new location its current location in the meetback district got a new graphic identity and and so we had a chance to redesign the site again four years later and that was a really cool opportunity because by now we knew how the site had been used we knew what was in the database one example I like to talk about is that we had in the 2009 version of the site launched a feature that allowed all users to make their own collections of artwork on the site another kind of living archive but that and that feature was somewhat popular but what you could not do is see other people's collections you could only see your own and you could share them on Facebook but there wasn't an area of the site where you could browse sort of crowdsourced collections by 2013 the Whitney's attitudes had loosened up a little bit and also we were able to look in the database and realize that some that the collections that had been made were reasonably interesting whereas in 2009 that would have been a leap of faith because we were just launching the system and so when we relaunched in 2013 we were able to sort of activate that feature more fully so it's a much different looking site but still built on the same CMS and now with an expanded database rather than starting from zero I'll talk about the the I'll talk about GSAP site and then start to wrap up so when we started to work with GSAP I'll talk about I want to talk about sort of some of the things that we first identified as as being qualities that we wanted to represent we saw the new site as a kind of exposure machine that in the same way that when you are in the building or near the building you can see what is happening this week that the website should should make that clear and transparent as well to current students and prospective students we also saw the website as a connection machine um that we would we built a database uh that relates content at GSAP in an interconnected way that shows that content dynamically as it comes and goes over time and that shows it reciprocally so that you can get from a faculty page to the courses they have taught um to sample work made in those courses and then all the way back um so in a way that sort of set of connections is the life of GSAP programs have courses courses have faculty members courses also have work work is made by students and so our database sort of models all of that um kind of like the paper model of the school of art exhibition that we looked at um and it's not really uh the sort of one way flows everything can potentially relate to everything else students can be associated with the publication the access of time is related to everything on the site um and so uh that sort of quality of interconnection was sort of part of GSAP's brand identity for us um and thirdly we saw the site as a kind of an ecosystem machine um the the previous dean had sort of described GSAP as a network and as a cloud we wanted to start to focus a little bit more on the local even on the planetary um and not just in the sense of flows of data but also in the sense of the importance of the contexts in which you guys make work and the context in which you cite work um as well as the specificities of local audiences um and uh the way um architecture is used and experienced and displayed in all the spaces at GSAP like this one um I'm really fond of this photograph as you mentioned I uh I was an undergrad here at Columbia to me this is such a New York image and such a Columbia image um layers accumulate of signage of postings of models of successive ideas for how space might be used right the same the floor is indicated in like four four or five different ways in this photograph and um it's it's plastic it's a plastic space and a plastic city um uh and that's even before we sort of add the people you guys and how you use the space um in all the different ways that you use the space um so those three ideas together um or sort of what went into GSAP's website and also into its identity um this is the tote bag so we we also designed um GSAP's identity system it's typeface it's logo um this is uh I think Neil Donnelly's tote bag uh using that system and so GSAP's typeface exists in four weights um morning afternoon evening and night to represent uh the um the life of the 24 hour life of a student um and the importance of of time to to pedagogy and learning that you're a different person um two years out than you were when you when you when you um matriculated um in a sense the typeface was also inspired by um Columbia sundial that kind of meeting place um or vestigial sundial um uh at the bottom of the steps uh so the logo casts a type a shadow is a shadow um again to sort of communicate the importance of time to the idea of interconnection to the idea of learning and to the idea of a context and architecture specifically um recently we've sort of redesigned the earth that is the earth has been at the bottom of the homepage for a long time um we recently redesigned it to make it a little more engaging so now um as you browse uh the earth at the bottom of the page or on the new GSAP global page which actually just launched um like a few days ago uh around friday I think um uh you can see images of GSAP's um uh footprint around the world um and we've done some cool mapping let's see this is called a molawede projection um so uh GSAP's geography its contexts are represented um uh as a interrupted map on the GSAP global page and as a as an interactive globe on the um on the bottom homepage um and so these show upcoming events the ones with green boxes are happening like real soon today um and uh I believe if the green box is flashing it's happening within the hour um and here you can get a sense of the sort of interconnectedness also of GSAP's database so when you click through to these each of these are real things whether it's a studio course or a workshop or an event um around the world um this also um corresponds to the campus screens which we also designed and you see them around um around the buildings here in New York uh also meant to sort of interconnect the activities of the different programs at GSAP uh so that you can see one another's work um and and see what events are happening um uh and this is the same visual language sort of across all those things with the same idea of a green box for example to show a um a a near an event which is about to happen um or a or a flashing green box to show uh like you know lights are flashing time to go into the theater um in a way those screens are kind of clocks and um if you I'm not sure if you notice but they actually go faster throughout the day and then slower so they are very zippy uh in the morning once you've had your coffee they begin to slow down um in the afternoon they get darker at night time they turn black like the Whitney's website and become really slow and almost kind of dreamlike and sometimes abstract they show different mixtures of content um at different times of day as well and they actually do literally show the time and as like literally the time and um so uh again that's sort of suits that tumbling head overhead that's your first person kind of head up experience um metaphorically of and kind of literally of life at GSAP life in an institution as you travel through it and then we can also represent that um oops sorry for the oh we're good um we can also represent that spread out on a map stored in a database and it's a database that's always growing um over time that same idea about flexibility in a different way um informed our identity for Columbia books um on architecture in the city so the imprint mark for your publisher um is a placeholder um it's pure potential um or it's kind of poche um but its aspect ratio changes depending on the size of the cover so when you're looking at the spine you can see what the book what shape the book is if you take it off the shelf um and the thickness of the lines corresponds to the number of pages in the book um I'm going to sort of skip forward a little bit we've also we also work on um the new museum's digital archive that's an archive of sort of 15 000 works um uh that launched a couple months ago and um also has a weird connection to GSAP because it's stored in uh the GSAP incubator or it's physically located in the same building as the GSAP incubator so it's kind of strange to and we literally next door to our office so it's sort of strange to encounter ourselves there um this is the what the archive literally looks like it's sort of mysterious um this is its structure and um uh as a database as a data structure it's complicated and understanding it was a big part of our work and in some cases reconfiguring that data structure um and as a design we designed it as a kind of a publication so the homepage can change periodically and so we wanted to represent it not as a database but almost in the way that we would represent a museum homepage um with different kinds of content represented in different ways it's really engaging um this design is meant to sort of evoke the kind of drama of being in the archive that photo that I just showed of opening one of those boxes um uh but it's also sort of a publication in that this homepage will be changed every couple months we also work on printed matters website which is an artist bookstore this database um has 40 000 works in it it's a really important archive of books made by artists and is also there's there's like 15 000 books in stock and they're sold on consignments so our system um issues payments to like 6000 artists a year creating this kind of social network of artists and it's organized around tables just like the store is um so i'll sort of wrap up by talking about our own studio a little bit um we've often been interested in um in authoring apps like economy the cms that builds um all the sites that i've just shown you um we also have launched a couple of apps of our own and this one is called bug it's an app for kids that turns um that turns uh color into sound uh so that kids can use it to sort of explore their environments and these are some trailers that we um made for bug um I believe Laurel Shwell edited these trailers on uh i movie on her phone like while riding the subway to and from work um so it's a sort of a mobile application um uh communicated using mobile technologies and um so you know of course this is an app just like economy the content management system that is used for sort of making sense or meaning out of your world or translating the context around you into into a new form a new kit of parts um and uh and we made it because it's also a um a description of our studio's perspective so in a sense these trailers are a kind of advertisement or right as good of an identity for our studio as anything and also at our studio it helps us to sort of advance and talk about the ideas um our own ideas about uh about archiving and reconfiguring um content um this is our studio today um and uh um quite recently and uh I just just say that sort of I'm going to end with or end with this slide more or less um uh this is a uh a set of t-shirts that Laurel designed for us um a couple of years ago and uh it shows at least up until then most of the current and former staff at linked by air in wit and it's a it's a system in which everybody's shirt depicts somebody else's face and yet again somebody else's name um and so it's a really nice uh also a nice image of our studio in that it shows how over the years as different designers and programmers have passed through the studio they each sort of add their um their perspective to the studio uh I think each of them have really been influenced by the perspective and the approach that the studio already had but also often um designers who have worked at linked by air have have shifted and pushed that perspective into new um uh paths um or at least new inflections on this on the on the voice that we already had in ways that that outlast them in ways that often are quite durable even after those designers um move on in their careers so our studio practice itself is a kind of an archive that's always evolving and always changing uh something that I've sort of learned over the years as we grew from just being me and my uh my wife Tamara to being a giant corporation of eight people um so that sense of sort of thinking about um a perspective or a design practice as being both a database and also a kind of a printer something that um that unfolds over time uh that's also as well as a model a way of expressing a perspective on the world um through an approach that you can articulate um that's an approach that I think works well for individual designers is a good way to think about your portfolio if you're still thinking about that um and it's it's an approach in some ways that that I um try to teach and model um with my thesis students uh at Yale as well can you turn the lights on okay we'll take some questions hi thanks for the talk um you described designing a content management system that can be used by several different institutions or entities but is there a sort of check or a way built into that content management system to ensure that one website doesn't look like another's yeah in other words like if the Whitney were hell bent on recreating g-sub's website um could like could they do that using the tool that you've designed that's a really good question and it's the same system they're not of course they're not it's not literally one shared database across across these institutions each institution is pretty separately some pretty much separately hosted um although I've often been intrigued about the idea of creating connections between them um that idea of difference was in economy from the start the way that we thought about it is that when we would start working with an institution there would be no modules so like g-sub's site a page on g-sub's site is a string of a text module a video module but also a publications module a courses module um a slideshow module and the idea of economy that sort of degree zero is that each institution when we arrive when we begin working with them there wouldn't economy wouldn't have any modules in it there wouldn't be such there wouldn't be such a thing as a text module so the the the syntax itself we would invent for each client meaning um you know the whitney doesn't have a publications module and several of our clients do have a text module um so there are you know there's sort of more in common than than zero but um but also of course what each module looks like is different so there's sort of there's a few different dimensions in which there's a lot of difference between each client what's the same is um that idea of rearrangement the idea that a page can be sort of like dna that a page can be represented as like a one-dimensional string of of of of parts of genes um so that you know I think if you look at all the sites we've created you probably can detect that common approach to design and you know I think if you're a practicing architect or a practicing graphic designer there's going to be something in common with your work across all of your clients that's basically a good thing um what economy has wound up doing and kind of what we always meant for it to do was to encode that encode our studio's approach um in software while still allowing the flexibility for our approach to change and for us to to find different solutions for every client so more than most other cms is um it does allow us to kind of start from scratch with each client even though there's that sort of shared spine among them um and also you know what's in terms of thinking about how our studio evolves over the years and how we get to sort of maintain some continuity but also grow and change it's really cool to have this one project that we literally have been working on for 12 years um that does connect across all of our clients and that's actually been a really interesting way to create connection among different designers and programmers who pass through the studio and I don't want to make it sound like our studio has um so much turnover it doesn't I mean people tend to stay for you know for for for several years but but um uh but for example with programmers when one programmer leaves and another one comes that um there's this this code base this software this way of working that's pretty well established that can be passed on from one to the next and the same thing goes for designers um has really put us on sort of good footing um to be able to to have some some sustainability as a studio and then also to to build on that foundation in order to be able to sort of safely shift where we go um along the way thanks anyone else I'm curious if one of the things that's interesting about the school of art website the Yale school of art website is that there's this sort of like polarizing take on it across the internet and I'm curious um it's kind of interesting that you have a chance to do it again and I'm interested if that feedback has informed how you're approaching v2 um v2 I think is going to be a pretty minimal um uh upgrade we we our goals at the moment we're still figuring out but our goals at the moment are to make it work on mobile um to kind of clean up and reeducate the design a little bit it's been a while since I've even really talked to students about the site culturally and so it's a little bit messier than I'd like it to be um even compared to where it was like five years ago um it just needs a little sweep um but um but there's no desire to change the design or change its editability that I've heard of it's actually sort of those features are remarkably popular in the administration um in terms of oh and the other thing that's really actually really interesting um to me uh is the issue of accessibility um this is an issue in architecture too I'm sure um but uh if you have limited vision or limited dexterity um that you can reliably use the website and um that's become a bigger and bigger um uh priority for for cultural institutions and schools um over the last few years which is great and you know the idea of sort of thinking about users and how they're going to perceive a site is really important to our practice and that means thinking about all users and all the different ways that they're going to physically engage with the site what does that mean when um when it's like everybody who's contributing the content and students are contributing animated gifts that that could be a problem for somebody with epilepsy um you know or that could make it hard to find what you're looking for if your vision is limited or that you know that could interfere with um with color contrast um so that's a really cool question actually and um and it's sort of like a legal and compliance question a little bit and just a good values question um so I don't know if we're going to um try to use technology to like slow down the animated gifts or try to use some kind of intelligence to to uh ensure accessibility even when the content is user supplied um or uh or what I mean in a way the design was always like the navigation on the sidebar of the school of art site is really dumb and how it's designed it's so it it the sort of static parts of the design are meant to um be visible no matter what else is happening but so those are some of the things we're going to be thinking about in terms of um it's polarizing effect on the internet uh and the school does get hate mail like all the time especially since um especially since it was featured on websites that suck people like it's a it's a popular assignment at like sort of third rate design schools is to redesign projects from websites that suck.com so we often get like proposals to redesign the site and stuff and uh and I actually it's featured on reddit like frequently actually turns out this discussion has happened like happens like once a year but um uh but I it's um I haven't heard anything about that as a as a goal for the redesign frankly which is a little bit surprising it maybe speaks to the school of arts sort of other lack of marketing instinct but you know our approach from the start was that this the site should appeal to current only to two groups of people current students and prospective students people who want to be the current students and um and if everybody else hates it um so what and if you think about that for about 30 seconds you'll realize there are some shortcomings to that approach but but um as long as we're talking about the suckiest website on the internet I feel like uh that I always felt like it had such a vitality to take this approach and a novelty but also you know gave agency to the students to like participate in the website which is something that at almost no institution now that it's been up there for like 10 12 years I never see it's like there were tons of wikis at that time but especially it's like the institutional channel uh doesn't really happen and I wonder if you've ever had the chance to do that again would you take that kind of approach where you can turn over keys to users and let them participate in the content of it did you think about that for the gsep website for example sure um yeah no not you guys no um yes that's a that's a good question um I think that I it's not like my approach to the world I mean I'm I'm uh not an anarchist and uh I would say that it it um that was our approach it was a solution to a problem and um a problem of how to make the site dynamic and um and also an opportunity to take advantage of these particularly talented designers and artists um I I wouldn't go around um applying that same solution to every problem actually um we that way of thinking definitely influenced lots like all the rest of our projects and so for example the Whitney which was like kind of our next big project um we approached that by saying all the staff at the Whitney basically should be able to edit the site there too there was no digital department at the time and so we tried to make a system a a culture at the Whitney and a technical system that would allow different areas of the site to be built and maintained by different departments at the museum we had like 50 different meetings with every different possible group at the museum and so we did have a very uh flat decentralized approach to our client relationship um and that tends to still be the case with the rest of our clients um it was also at the Whitney a way of creating a sort of bottom-up pressure to turn them into a sort of like a digital institution it led to them building a digital department eventually and they did centralize a lot of that activity um without really sort of reducing how dynamic the website is so um and I think the other thing that we really learned from the art school site was not just about democracy but was about change and that's definitely a value that we've brought to all of our projects including GSAP um that a site is an organism and a culture that's going to unfold over time um GSAP does have quite a lot of editors actually like 65 or something like that uh people have worked in the site um and uh so you know but it also has a very capable communications department um we're looking now at creating sort of special areas of the site for students um and I think we would definitely think about like that students could edit their own pages which would be public um uh and you know could submit their own student work that's that's stuff that's sort of always been like a possible phase of the project um but there isn't really you know or maybe you could submit events for like for student events which is a pretty rich part of the fabric at GSAP and and it yields architecture school like student groups um but uh there basically isn't a need for students to edit the homepage at GSAP or to populate the site because like Jesse does it um as a as a fan of the studio and the work that your studio produces um and you know having sort of tracked your your body of work for you know over a decade now I feel like when you come up with a new project we can sort of understand that it's from link by air it's made by link by air and it's it's hard to quantify but you know a lot of it has to do with the fact this kind of idea of change constant change right this is like this thing that's a little bit hard to pin down a little bit slippery which is part of the the DNA of the the the websites that you produce um but you know and I think that aspect or that sort of um quality is quite apparent at least for me as a as a designer but I was wondering does the studio have uh a stance or what is the relationship to style as in visual style I just want to say one more thing about Ken's question and I and I also that's also a great question um the other thing about the school of art site was that we were members of that community and so I don't want to sort of downplay the idea of democracy either um one sort of wring one thing I one anecdote I like to tell is that we were initially opposed to giving undergrads access to the school of art site ability to edit it because they didn't physically live in those studios in a way they didn't have physical a physical stake in the building and um we we weren't sure that they were sort of a part of the community in the sense that they um that they shared the same interest basically as the school so sort of thinking about culture I think is something that we really learned from that site um not just that like everybody can edit it and it will automatically be better but that the site is a representation of an organization's culture and is able to to to be a window onto it um and also can improve the culture of an organization as well and so I think like the campus screens at GSEP are sort of part of that in the sense they're part of thinking about GSEP as a culture um that we are kind of contributing to and feeding back into as well as um building off of um in terms of visual style um I mean I think people do I don't know people I hear both ways actually I think and people do sort of I seem to identify link by error sites visually as well um some of it might be structural like um it you know at least for a while when sites were built with economy you could tend to be able to see like the seams between the modules a little bit like you could really see that in the first version of the witness site um and uh and I like that I mean that's that's also I think part of our value is values an aspect of our values is that you can sort of see how a system works as a as a user of that system um and that might and that's a little bit of an ethical idea in some sense that you know a sort of political aesthetic idea and um that that that does have probably a formal result that you can see that you know that that you sort of look at the site and it doesn't have that much decoration in a way um uh you know in other ways I think that's something that has really been so that that sort of simplicity like making a complicated system out of simple parts that's a style idea as well as a procedural idea um uh in other ways I think you know our style of course gets influenced by the designers that that work with us and um uh who in turn are influenced by you know the designers that came before them and they're there right now and by tomorrow and I um so I think as far as like advice or something um you know I don't think you need to have like a visual style to say that you have a visual style but I think you know that you have an approach to design that you know that you can that that casts a shadow and the shadows your visual style um it's it's probably a good idea that you have you have an approach to design that approach has some linkage with the form that you're making um I think that's a good approach for designers and and of all kinds um uh and that your approach is like connect to your value system in some way um uh whether it's you know being democratic or um you know realising that that you're not making monuments you're making cultures um I think that's important to having a sort of sustainable practice that you can feel good about and then we'll add something good to the world um uh but yeah but that you don't really have one without the other I think. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time Dan.