Francesco
Scheffczyk

As part of the NODE Festival 2020, a new, collaborative platform needed to be developed to explore, discuss and create content on the topic of sustainability + technology. Within a course in the summer semester 2020 at University of Applied Sciences Mainz, we dealt with this task. In the end, my concept for the "Second Nature Lab" was implemented by Jean Böhm with the support of Prof. Florian Jenett.

Concept

As already mentioned, the new platform "Second Nature Lab" was to be launched in the course of the NODE Festival 2020. The aim of the website was to bring the collaborative character of the NODE Festival into the digital space. The site therefore had to fulfil several aspects.

Exploring and experiencing content

On one hand, it had to be possible to explore and grasp the various formats and contents of the festival. In doing so, the site had to provide an overview and promote the exploratory nature of the festival.

In order to make the experience of the content as individual as possible, a layout was developed that is flexible and modular. Consisting of individual windows, the layout can be customised through the user by moving the borders.

In addition, further blocks unfold around the current content, which can be used to navigated to further content. This creates an explorative "wandering" through the website, taking different routes.

Being together

Furthermore, there should always be a feeling of togetherness. There should be a feeling of experiencing content together as well as generating content, just like at a real festival. The exchange among the festival visitors should also be encouraged.

In order to strengthen the feeling of togetherness, the mouse pointers of the visitors of the page you are currently on can optionally be displayed. In addition, a gradient visualises the currently most important topics and keywords.

In order to not only increase the sense of community, but also to stimulate exchange, comments can be written on the page. These can be placed visually anywhere on the page, for example to discuss a particular paragraph more specifically.

Archiving the festival experience

Finally, it should also be possible to record one's own track at the festival. In other words, the individual routes that one took while visiting the website had to be made comprehensible.

In order to better capture the festival experience, there is a separate user space for each user. In this space, the user can view the routes he has taken so far and jump back to certain points. In addition, all comments that the user has written are displayed.

To get a better understanding of the concept, it's best to watch the last two videos on the left.

Implementation

Unfortunately, some of the ideas developed above could not be finally implemented. Instead, other aspects have been added that were not present in my concept. In keeping with the theme of sustainability, the CO₂ consumption is tracked and constantly updated when visiting the website. The loading of images is blocked by default to keep CO₂ consumption low. Images are only loaded on request.

More information on the implementation can be found on Jean's Portfolio.