# Heatherwick Studio Intranet
URL: https://www.associativetrails.com/work/heatherwiki/
Client: Heatherwick Studio
Type: Intranet
Summary: Digging that studio scene — A bespoke company intranet for one of the UK's top design studios.

A beautiful company intranet - fit for a multi-award winning industrial design and architecture practice.

This bespoke development combines beautiful aesthetics with great functionality - staff skills, project tracking and a famed database of tens of thousands of objects dating back to the studio's earliest days.

## The challenge

Heatherwick Studio initially approached us to look at ways of improving their staff appraisal system. The brief quickly expanded to encompass a comprehensive intranet for all their staff.

The system needed to be highly functional, but also reflect the design aesthetic of the studio - practical and unfussy but with the flair and attention to details that characterises much of the studio's work.

The client insisted upon a hands-on approach to the aesthetic design of the system, as well as having strong ideas on the informational design.

## The solution

An extended HTML prototyping process before the main development began allowed Heatherwick Studio staff a large amount of input into the visual and information design of key pages - something that then informed the rest of the system. At one point in the prototype process, a restaurant menu was presented as an input into the visual design of the application. These ideas were worked in to the next iteration of the prototype to great effect.

Once the prototype was agreed, we built a fully functioning intranet system with a number of features that would help studio members every day:

- A fully customisable portal entry point - the layout can be easily changed depending on news item importance
- An application-wide user subscription model allowing users to quickly see updates to content they are particularly interested in
- Integration with OpenAsset image library
- Comprehensive staff skills profiles, including software skills, languages, education history and professional experience
- Project records - with links to staff profiles, external organisations and objects on the studio archive
- A current project dashboard displaying key metrics such as the resource plan, milestones and key team members
- Network drives containing documents can be spidered by the intranet and the documents discovered browsed from within the system
- The Heatherwick Object Library - a curated and indexed collection of physical objects from the Studio's beginnings to the present day

## The outcome

As one would expect with such a prestigious client, there were some highly individual features of the system that were particularly satisfying to design and implement. The completed system provides a stylish and usable interface to important company information.

Technologies used

Adobe Coldfusion, Microsoft SQL Server, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, Axomic OpenAsset.

## Screens
- Prototype - staff list: The staff directory prototype filters people by name, skills, location, domain and studio knowledge, with an A to Z index.
- Prototype - alternative 1: An alternative staff profile layout sets a person's skills and domains beside their projects and a feed of their recent activity.
- Prototype - staff view: This prototype profile lists a person's studio knowledge, skills, past experience and education, with a timeline of their recent activity.
- Prototype - alternative 2: A further prototype iteration tried a different colour scheme and navigation style for the same staff-profile content.
- News article: Each news story can be tagged, illustrated with photographs and discussed in a comments thread below.
- Home page: The layout can be rearranged depending on story importance, and users see updates to the tags they follow.
- Manage home page layout: Administrators choose a layout for each row of the home page, and fill each slot with a chosen story or the latest from a feed.
- Object library: Each object in the studio's archive has its own record: category, year made, the project it belongs to, tags and photographs.
- Studio handbook content page: The studio handbook sets out practical guidance for working in the studio, from desk etiquette to recycling.
- Project view page: Project records link to the staff and external organisations who worked on them, alongside a gallery of images.
- Tags: Controlled tags get an image and a description of the area they cover, with every other tag listed beneath.