A digital space for Gabriele Basilico Archive.
Bringing an audience-centric approach into the design of a digital space dedicated to the heritage of the Italian photographer, his work, vision and thoughts on photography.
THE CHALLENGE
Create a digital strategy to help audiences know about and explore the Gabriele Basilico’s vast artistic production.
THE OUTCOME
A unified vision as an archive for new beginnings, including the development of a rich immersive site, an open-ended discovery space designed for multiple audiences.
Archiviogabrielebasilico.it is the result of a deep collaboration between the Gabriele Basilico archive team and Jüniör. It brings to life the experience, knowledge and production of the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico and delivers unprecedented access to the primary materials of his archive: his work, publications, interviews and becomes an open-to-public source for research not only into his work and but also into the world of photography in Italy.
Behind the scenes
Bringing a design eye into the archive
In 2018, the head of the studio, Giovanna Calvenzi, approached Jüniör with a simple request: “I want a website dedicated to Gabriele Basilico.” With that directive, the first action was to collaboratively think about the future of the studio and understand better the reasons behind the need for an online presence.
Being very open to experimenting, Calvenzi realised that bringing the capabilities of design thinking into the invention of a website would allow the Gabriele Basilico studio to build better experiences, create a digital space for the public exploration of their archival holdings with a clear strategic point of view on their use-value.
So, Jüniör and the team started a long and intimate journey and after 2 years of collaboration, they became officially an archive, defining also a unified intent to have a digital presence: Gabriele Basilico Archive is a space open to dialogue with students, researchers and collectors, and the online presence aims to open a digital door to these resources, reveal hidden materials to new experiences, and offer broader vision into his work and photography.
photos by Antonella Bozzini
“Our wish is that through this website, the audience will not only search for his photographs but also discover a whole range of materials that before they didn’t know about.”
Meaning-making with archival materials
The project started with an extensive design research phase. Practically speaking it went like this: Jüniör ran a profound field exploration phase to understand the needs and interests in having a digital space by running workshops with the Gabriele Basilico studio team and rounds of interviews with experts in photography and his work. To support this, Jüniör also has carried out desk research especially on the activation strategies of collections and archives by mapping trends on the online discovery of materials. This first phase helped to define the initial design direction to the project and map all the materials that can be activated.
During the second phase, envisioning, Jüniör team gathered together the findings and looked for patterns, observations and insights and shared them with Gabriele Basilico studio team. Then came the ideation and prototyping actions where we have collectively made mock-ups of heritage activation strategies and of their digital formats. This meant building sketches and rapid paper prototypes while collecting feedback to make it better.
Clockwise, from top left: conversations in action at the studio; some of the design tools in use during a workshop; visit to the archive space; collaborative work on the information architecture map during design sprints.
An audience-centric approach to discovery
The final design direction is aimed at creating a rich, immersive site, an open-ended discovery of archival materials tailored for different audiences, therefore, we worked on creating and defining personas. We wanted to reach a result where art and photography lovers can have a full view of this work and production, researchers can have an understanding of the materials that they can further research about, students can have the first taste of his approach into photography, curators can find curatorial hints and inspire their work and collectors can have a glimpse of the dissemination of his work internationally.
Focused on the needs of the audiences rather than the type of materials and classifications, this new digital space allows visitors to wander freely, pass from curiosities to serendipitous learning in his work and approach into photography. Perhaps, even more importantly, it aspires to be a generous example of enabling public access to photography archives in Italy.
Illustrations describing the personas defined during the project, based on their attitude, relationship with photography, knowledge/expertise, expectations from the new digital space.
The New Digital Space
Design Principles
The final result is a new digital fully-responsive website, which means that all the materials online are accessible across different devices, including mobile phones, tablets and desktops. Instead of creating a bold on-top brand, we structured the site with a minimal layout that leaves space for the content and visually dedicated it and underscore the brand itself: the author. The simple and easy-to-navigate structure — notice the homepage with the expanded menu highlighting already the content, the content of each section with short-intros and full-views, and the shades of warm color code (inspired by the most used colors in his publications) — helped us to set the ground to clearly communicate the content.
The same thinking is also behind the cross-contents such as ‘mostre collegate’ or ‘scopri anche’ which aims to give continuity to user engagement connecting most of the content of the site to each other fostering a serendipitous learning experience.
Content curation
The entire website is aimed at getting to know Gabriele Basilico, therefore offers an important opportunity to get to know Gabriele Basilico's work, going beyond the single artworks. There are two essential and content-wise significant sections on the website: The former is Discover that allows the user to get to know Gabriele Basilico; and to discover, one by one, all his publications, during life and posthumously; to know his photographic research through his writings. The latter is Explore allows users to through time, with a ‘timeline’ capable of showing the path that led Gabriele Basilico towards the progressive affirmation as a photographer, with ‘le mostre’ section giving an important space to his thematic and monographic exhibitions. ‘Nelle collezioni’ section offers a map and long list to indicate which cultural institutions, public and private, national and international, which preserve the works of Gabriele Basilico. Finally, ‘Gabriele Basilico si racconta’ gives the possibility to deepen his work through documents, divided by theme, made of his own words or videos.
“Penso spesso che l’iniziazione attraverso i libri di fotografia sia stata determinante nel farmi pensare, più che alle singole foto, a ipotesi di libri, di mondi raccontati attraverso un libro».”
Filters and targeted research
Through this website, the work of Basilico has been presented in a very rigorous and generous way: hundreds of items like books, exhibitions and collections have been made accessible by public. More specifically it’s possible to find information on more than 118 personal publications and 190 exhibitions worldwide. For us, it was a given to also enable a free search in these sections and the possibility to sort all these materials by year, title, city and institution name.
Together with
This project is a result of a profound collaboration between Gabriele Basilico Archive and Jüniör, developed together with Giacomo Traldi and Alex Piacentini. Our sincerest thanks all the participants of the project.
Did you know?
GABRIELE BASILICO
Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 12 August 1944 – 13 February 2013) has been among the most influential Italian photographers and is considered one of the masters of Italian and European contemporary photography. In his vast body of work, that reflects on the transformation of urban areas in the industrial and postindustrial era, the theme of cities as complex and subtle products of economy and history occupies a central role.
Guided by a deep interest for architectural structures and for all artefacts that defined cities in time, he chose the rigour of the documentary style to narrate the constant process of stratification that shapes them, investigating the relationship between people and constructed spaces for nearly forty years.
Using different methods but always loyal to the documentary style, he created an uninterrupted narration of places, exploring numerous European and international cities and in the meantime relating them to one another, returning the extraordinary complexity of the urban settings inhabited by contemporary society. In the years he built a compact and coherent method of photographic investigation, also thanks to his habits of going and returning to places, of observing the anthropized landscape, that influenced the vast area of contemporary photography that observes the transformations of the world.
Want to know more?
If you have questions about the project, just write to us. We’ll be happy to hop on a quick call or meet for a coffee.
Or, read more about our approach, and check Method+Tools.
