Originally I wrote this post about a week ago but it’s now live! What is it you ask? It’s a digital legacy project called “Archive” created by the 2017 Railyard cohort.

Let me explain: Each year Railyard challenges the current cohort to come up with something that can leave a legacy behind for the next cohort. We receive some money and come up with a proposal and budget on what we’re doing, then pitch it to the studio. Sounds easy, right?

How Might We...

Is a method to rephrase insights to questions that would allow us to turn challenges into opportunities. So we utilized the Google Venture sprint process to help us figure out what on earth we’re going to propose that could help us leave a legacy. Our first step was to come up with a long-term goal, that is, ultimately what are we trying to achieve? At first this was to “leave a legacy”, which over time transitioned to “leave something of value”? But how might we determine what is valuable? How might we also make it valuable to those outside of Railyard? And why are we only looking at future cohorts? How might we make this work for us now? What about previous cohorts?

Through these questions we brainstormed quite a few ideas that matched with those “how might we’s”. Ultimately, we ended up with something along the lines of:

A platform that would facilitate the exchange of knowledge, ideas, tools and resources.

Broad right? That’s what we thought too. We looked at this deeper, looked around our space, and tried to come up with more ideas on what we could do to further facilitate the transfer of knowledge. Sure we had access to previous cohort’s files on the server, there was some contact with them in the first week through a casual get-together for drinks, but there was never a consistent transfer or sharing of knowledge from one cohort to another, or even from Railyard to others outside of Railyard.

We know we’re not super smart people, but there’s other super smart people out there: Previous Cohorts (Railyard Alumni), professors, researchers, speakers, etc. Then we realized, wait, they already do share their knowledge with others, it’s called books (and Medium articles)!

If you’ve never been to our studio space, Railyard has this really ugly metal looking cart that we call a bookshelf. It’s kind of sad, there’s books on it, and random stuff from previous cohorts. Why is this sad excuse of a bookshelf even here? So we challenged ourselves: Can we create a presence that achieves our long term goal (of sharing knowledge) and answers our how might we questions (of providing value to all)?

Thus was born, the bookshelf. I’m not going to go into too much detail here with the bookshelf because it’s a shelf, we built it, we stained it, we put it on the wall. We curate books for it with the help of Railyard creator, Ronna Chisolm. We didn’t buy the shelf from IKEA but that’s not the point.

 

A Digital Perspective

Unsurprisingly, the bookshelf didn’t satisfy all of our “How Might We” questions. Therefore we began looking at this from a digital perspective, because we’re all so invested in the world wide web (it feels weird to say that), so we looked at how we could possibly bring this idea to the online world allowing us to leverage the Railyard Alumni network and others who would gain value from this platform but not be able to physically come to our studio space to borrow the books we curated for our shelf above. That’s how we came up with the digital version of “Archive”.

The Digital Archive is a board for sharing links from the internet, kind of like Pinterest but specifically for Railyard cohorts (past, present and future). The topics of interest include things like Business & Design (Dossier and Railyard’s bread and butter), Technology, Inspirations, Resources and anything else that doesn’t quite seem to fit but is still worth sharing.

“The Digital Archive is a board for sharing links from the internet, kind of like Pinterest but specifically for Railyard cohorts.”

The idea is that each cohort (and its members) can contribute to this vast directory of awesome useful links that help us become better designers. Tapping into Railyard Alumni to help us discover links that we may not come across in our everyday tasks. Because that’s the amazing thing about Railyard that I forgot to mention in the beginning, each cohort is very diverse. And that’s the beauty of it, diversity adds a whole new layer to the sharing of knowledge.

We try to make it easy.

We built the digital platform to be as easy to use and as frictionless as possible, so when you submit a link, we scrape the page for you, grabbing what we think would be useful such as a selection of images to choose from and the page title. All you do is fill in the reason on why you want to share this link. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to share links without the person submitting the link having to worry about coming up with a title and figuring out how to take a screenshot and upload an image. We do all that for you; of course you can still customize these to whatever you see fit but we’ve tried to make it painless.

Bug-squatter.

Word of warning. We built this platform from the ground in just a few weeks (on and off), this includes design and development. So think of this as version 0.01. If you notice any weird bugs that hasn't already been reported, please let us know. We'd also love your feedback on what works for you and what you'd like to see in the future.

There’s a wish list of features we’re hoping to add in the future and for now submitting links is only available to Railyard Cohorts (past, present and future) but everyone is welcome to look at the Archive and we hope it will help you become a better designer (or at least be inspired with what you see).

So if you haven't already, check out the Railyard Archive.

Thanks,

Railyard 2017 Cohort (RY17)