Harvard's Graduate School of Design was trapped in the early '90s -- students and administrators were communicating with a mailing list that blasted hundreds of people whether it was an important alert (Graduation is cancelled!) or an aside (where's the laser cutter?). This resulted in confusion, annoyance and an incredibly disorganized means of communication. We set out to build a better portal for student communications as well as a repository for institutional knowledge.

We worked closely with students and faculty from the GSD to imagine all the scenarios and needs of a student communication site. Interactions were designed for maximum ease to promote adoption by the students -- we had to prove that this system was a better way to communicate and encourage students to post regularly. Any usability obstacles would have crippled the system. Our inuitive interfaces and user screens make it easy for any student to create a blog, ask a question and harness the power of the GSD community. We spent countless hours customizing Drupal, an open source content management system, to do as we wished.

It paid off. One year later, important institutional knowledge has been archived, preserved and, best of all, made searchable. Incoming students no longer have to badger their peers for the whereabouts of the laser cutter or the best place to grab a bagel; it's all waiting for them in the sleek, functional and expansive database of student communications.

Student Blogs

In addition to asking and answering questions, students are able to create a blog for a project or a class. Beyond just making blogging tools accessible for students, this helps aggregate the content they create and provide inspiration and institutional knowledge for the next generation.

Question and Answer

The new GSD site needed to eliminate the deluge of questions posed to the mailing list day and night, which would stuff a student's inbox with unnecessary messages. Our solution was a community style device similar to Yahoo! Answers or Blurt It, where someone asks a question and receives answers from the community. The person who asked the question selects the answer that best resolves the question. When a question is marked as answered, the interface reflects it with a giant star.