Excellence with Edge

November 2006

In early 2005 George Thrush, director of the newly minted Northeastern University School of Architecture, sought to create a brand plan for the institution’s youngest professional school.

To build on the momentum, Thrush and marketing and communications vice president Brian Kenny approached the EdTech Center to construct the School’s Web site, a major component of the brand plan. The two envisioned the Web site as a vehicle to coordinate communications efforts at the School, but they needed a custom site with advanced functionality to achieve their goals. The EdTech project team comprised project manager Deanna Aho, programmer Sue Aman, and interface developer Katelynn O’Brien.

The School of Architecture planned to design the site, and it wanted EdTech to build a unique site that reflected the new school’s status as an innovative professional program with a strong research component. In early planning meetings, EdTech Center staff encouraged the architecture faculty to consider the Web site not only as a means to communicate with students, parents, faculty and the architecture community, but also as a way to solve problems. The Architecture faculty decided it wanted to capture data for multiple reporting purposes, as well as tenure and merit consideration.

The EdTech team viewed this project as an opportunity to practice its philosophy of designing scalable solutions. The team worked together to develop a sophisticated tool set to provide extensive reporting capabilities, as well as a repository for faculty work.

Recognizing that such a system could serve as a model for other sites across the university, the team began an extensive, year-long process, which included expanding the project scope. Today the School of Architecture has an elegant, multifaceted Web site, and plans are underway to expand that functionality to other departments.

Programmer Sue Aman developed the site in PHP with a MySql database. The Web site includes an interface for faculty/staff members to login and enter personal information and data related to projects and scholarly accomplishments, such as courses taught, research conducted, and college and community service performed.

An additional administrator interface allows a main administrator to contribute more general departmental content, including information about grants, courses, news, events, and NAAB standards. Information submitted through the administrator interface automatically populates many areas of the site, including faculty profile pages and a recently constructed research database.

The site’s efficient design allows the same information that populates the faculty information to also fill the back-end reports, including the College of Arts & Sciences’ online annual report form; faculty merit reports, which can be generated by faculty name, or year or a combination of the two; and monthly trustees’ newsletters.

A final, unique feature of the Architecture site is a picture viewer developed by Katelynn O’Brien. The photo viewer is used in the Research > Creative Works section of the site to view multiple images associated with a project. With its scrollable thumbnail viewer, users can access a larger view of the image with an optional caption.

Just months after the site’s launch, the School of Architecture is realizing a significant increase in efficiency and a decrease in duplication of efforts. Reports convey consistent information; faculty have convenient access to upload and retrieve personal and professional data; and the architecture community and the general public can search the Northeastern Architecture faculty’s research interests by topic.

The Architecture project pushed the boundaries of conventional Web sites. Building functionality that saves time and money represents the excellence with an edge that is becoming a hallmark of the EdTech Center’s work. Word of the Architecture site has spread quickly. The EdTech Center is currently discussing adding the same functionality to the English, Communications, Economics, and Modern Languages Web sites.