FLATTEN

Summary

“Projects, flattened.” Graduation shows scattered across school sites, one-off show sites, Instagram and PDFs, brought onto one plane.

52,214

university department records

national public data

786

design departments identified

across 217 institutions

₩0

added infrastructure cost, by design

Strategy, branding, UX/UI, frontend, backend and data model

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Overview

University project records scatter across school sites, show sites that last a year, Instagram, Behance and PDFs – and on the way, who made what, in which programme, where and when is lost. Graduation shows come first: they are public, happen every year, have fixed dates and venues, and students want them seen.

Key decisions

1. 01Separate the ongoing programme from each year's show

   Linking years is the one structural advantage over the scattered records.

   →A department's graduation show (programme) and that year's show (edition) are separate, so school pages build up year by year. Joint shows link many-to-many.

2. 02No posters by default

   A poster is someone's work in its own right.

   →Posters without cleared rights are blocked from rendering; a typographic, neutral metadata card shows instead.

3. 03Fix the success measure before building

   So the numbers can't be reinterpreted after the fact.

   →The key measure was defined first: the share of sessions that view at least two different schools. Moving between departments of one school doesn't count.

4. 04The real first product is the operations tool

   The human time it takes to verify and post one show sets the service's limit.

   →An admin tool came first: a candidate queue where date, venue and cancellation must be checked by a person before anything is published.

5. 05Designed for zero added cost

   An unvalidated product mustn't close because of its bills.

   →Events are batched and rolled up nightly so the dashboard never scans raw events; no paid products are used.

6. 06A zoomable poster wall

   Hundreds of shows should be scannable at once without getting slow.

   →It draws at most 900 tiles and drops detail as you zoom out, loading images only up close.

Data

• Source – the 2023 department list from the national university information portal, 52,214 rows.
• Design department master – 786 departments at 217 institutions, with 90 prioritised for the first wave.
• Structure – 20 tables, built to link people, projects, programmes, institutions and years.

Next

The roadmap widens from graduation shows to works, people, capstones and collaborations; the first season's validation decides whether it continues.