2018 | Fondazione Cariplo

An Online Home for Italy's First Digital Culture Center

Web Design, Information Design, Digital Identity, and Experience

When an esteemed platform for new media and a top cultural foundation teamed up to open Italy’s first–ever dedicated space for digital culture in the heart of Milan, they chose Accurat to oversee the development of the center's website: a task that involved integrating a rich history into a future–facing web experience.

Brief

“Meet the Media Guru” (MtMG), the brainchild of art critic and technologist Maria Grazia Mattei, launched in 2005 with regular events featuring high–profile thought leaders from the worlds of media, design, and technology. Fondazione Cariplo joined as a partner in 2018 to support the growth of the organization, and together they relaunched MtMG as MEET. As part of the scaled relaunch, they planned to open a first–of–its–kind permanent space to host meetings, exhibitions, workshops, and digital performances. In conceptualizing the web presence for the new location, they wanted to incorporate the vast digital archives of MtMG.

Process

Paolo Iabichino, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Italy, led the transformation of MtMG into MEET. He assembled a team of experts that included Accurat to overhaul the organization's branding. Our work—the design and development of the front and back–end of MEET's new website—began with the mapping and classification of MtMG's content archive. This research poured the foundation for the site architecture, beginning with the design of a searchable database of material—imagery, video, blog posts—recorded from events spanning over a decade. Diving into the media, we developed a system of custom tagging based on subjects covered in documentation.

As construction of the center in Milan progressed and new branding schematics were finalized, we collaborated with designer Alessandro Boscarino to refine the website's look and establish a visual harmony that spanned physical and digital realms.

Solution

The nucleus of MEET's new platform is a timeline feature that, on the surface, presents the organization's rich multimedia assets sequentially, color–coded by content type. Resembling a colorful bookshelf, the display is irresistibly clickable. Once users engage with the timeline, its advanced functionality becomes more apparent. For example: tags associated with each entry on the timeline surface related topics and give users the option to filter by interest, and thus rearrange the timeline to suit their tastes. Users can also search by content type, speaker, and year.

A view of the full suite of search filters. Auto–fill functionality helps users find topics of interest.

The responsive platform adapts to all ratios and resolutions, providing a seamless experience agnostic of device. To ensure cross–device functionality, we wrote a script that would determine the size of the timeline's individual modules according to the number of results and the size of a screen.