ABOUT

Overview/ Challenge
The City of Toronto came to us in early 2020 because they needed a digital property for their planned Year of Public art in 2021. Although there is a plethora of public art in the city and some events meant to showcase it, there is no single resource cataloguing all of it.

The Year of Public Art was meant to start in early 2021, but has been delayed due to COVID. Because of this, the project became ARTworxTO and is ongoing.

Strategy:

The goal of this project is to create an immersive digital experience for public art in the Toronto, which would be the first of its kind in the city. This means we had to create something that would work for everyone in the city.

Part of this has been working incredibly closely with our clients to constantly refine the scope and priorities of the project. To do this, we use an Agile development methodology, which is normally used in a software development context, and apply it to the needs of this project. This allows us to make the most effective use of our resources and empowers the City to have conversations with their stakeholders and be able to report back to us.

Because of the broad audience of this property, a lot of work has been put into usability testing (with our partner Code For Canada). This includes making sure the features that we’re recommending and putting out there are actually usable for people in the city and this extensive testing has resulted in one of the most thoroughly built properties we’ve ever worked on.


Result:
This site just went live in March and hasn’t been publicly promoted yet because of COVID restrictions, so there aren’t quantitative results yet. Anecdotally, we’ve received incredibly positive feedback on the site from key stakeholders and we’re excited to see what comes next.

We approached this project not as a website, but as a service design tool and be believe this shows in the published product.