One year after Span designed the visual identity and website of the South Side Home Movie Project, we were brought back to design UI/UX features that enabled community participation to be possible. As a cultural preservation project, these features create an equitable process for filling in historical gaps of Chicago‘s South Side communities.

The design process was iterative with the South Side Home Movie Project’s team, including their artistic advisors and community members. This transformed design reviews into discovery sessions in understanding the role of community cataloging and the features necessary to do so.

The UI/UX features Span designed included hosting archiving events, allowing users to enter content through the front end, creating profiles, submitting memories associated with a film's time-stamp, and entering tags to advance the relational searches across the site. As most family films are silent, these new features allow users to publish their remembered histories of the people, places, and events documented.

South Side Home Movie Project is an Arts + Public Life initiative at the University of Chicago.