The Place, Memory, & Culture Incubator Living Digital Archive

We're designing and developing the Harlem Digital Archive, a living archive to preserve the rich history of Harlem, NYC. I advise on best practices, created mockups and design options, data flows, and custom coded html, CSS, and JavaScript.

Overview

The PMCI Living Digital Archive empowers Harlem’s intergenerational grassroots culture-makers to document, share, access, and connect over Harlem’s living cultural landscape. The Living Digital Archive collects, organizes, and hosts digitized cultural assets of Harlem’s histories, prioritizing the preservation work of Harlem’s Black, African, and Afro-Caribbean communities, and facilitates access through the Living Digital Archive website.

Problem space

The Archive aims to actively resist colonial archival gatekeeping practices and celebrate expressive culture, organizing, and community-building efforts that transform, reclaim, and preserve the built environment and heritage of Harlem. While an independently stewarded project, the Living Archive is initiated by the Spitzer School’s Place, Memory, and Culture Incubator and Harlem-based Partners, the primary role of the Digital Archive is to share and steward material contributed by the Harlem community.

My role: UX Consultant

As a UX Consultant, I advocate for our users at every stage of the project. From designing and facilitating visioning workshops to prototyping and usability testing, I bring UX expertise to an amazing team of researchers, educators, and SMEs.

Tools

Figma, Miro, Notion, Omeka, HTML, & CSS

Timeline

February 2024 - Ongoing

Roadmapping & workshopping

Carefully planning out the project

I started by designing and facilitating a series of visioning workshops for alignment, capacity building, and managing expectations. I roughly used AJ&Smart's 4C's framework and modified it to include time and space to listen to our community partners.

Collect

Mind map

✧ 150+ nodes

Choose

Prioritization

✧ 50+ to <20 features

Create

Design workshop

✧ 10 sketching boards

Research

✧ 4 partner interviews

✧ 9 areas of analysis

Commit

Guiding design principles

✧ 3 commitments

✧ 2 non-negotiables

✧ 2 design statements

Designing the frontend & backend

From the inside-out & outside-in

I took a wholistic systems design approach and designed the backend along with the frontend systems. And based off our visioning workshops, I am designing and building our MVP which includes research backed design objectives along with community driven non-negotiable.

83%

We increased our Overall Accessibility Score from 71% to 83%!

What's next?

Next steps, recommendations, and reflections

First, we are currently in the process of doing our first round of usability testing to establish our baseline. Second, we are sandboxing softwares and platforms to start building our Beta. And lastly, we are looking at ways to increase our accessibility score.

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