Kiosk in a Flash
December 2004

When the Cleveland Museum of Art called with a rush job we found the tools and experience to get them up and running on time.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, a long-standing client of ours, wanted a kiosk to accompany an exhibition of Japanese Prints in a hurry - a big hurry. On Thursday afternoon, we received an email "The Interactive-In-A-Week Project is on." The kiosk needed to be live eight days later, the following Friday.

We raided our toolbox to find elements that we could reuse to speed up the process. By Friday we had agreed a general scheme for the kiosk with the client, and devised a plan that allowed most of the streams of work to be carried on in parallel. Over the weekend, a programmer started work on the technical aspects that we knew were going to be the toughest challenge, while a graphic designer started designing the interface.

By the end of Monday we'd agreed the overall design approach. Although the kiosk was going to be in Flash, we decided to use a technique that we've used before on web sites that had a dual interface; HTML for accessibility, Flash for higher production values. In this case, the advantage of the dual system was that the content team could review the system in a low-fidelity HTML format, before the high-quality Flash version was ready.

We used our existing CEF content management tool, with which the team at the Cleveland Museum of Art were already familiar. This was tuned to support the elements of the interactive, and to produce two outputs: an HTML site for review, and an XML document which drove the kiosk.

An additional benefit of the CEF approach is that it is easy for the curatorial and editorial teams at the Museum to continue editing the content of the kiosk after launch. And there are now plans to use its ability to generate multiple editions to create a version of the interactive for the Museum's web site.

The kiosk, incorporating custom zooming controls for viewing the prints (some extremely detailed) in high resolution, interactive 'detail viewers' for highlighting particular points on prints, a comparison feature delivering side-by side views of related images, and a number of video interviews, was up and running on time, ready for the opening of the exhibition. Phew!