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From the Cologne School of Design to the Köln International School of Design

The name is programme: The Cologne Model as the basis of an increasingly international aligned college. It was only 11 years ago (1991) that the Cologne School of Design was founded by Michael Erlhoff and his engaged colleagues. In these eventful years the Cologne Model has not only established and proven itself, but it has also developed and improved along the way. A model, which particularly by the project-oriented doctrine, the annulment of traditional term-structures, and the denial of the idea of specialisation, provided attention and discussions again and again, and in the meantime it flowed into curricular concepts abroad.

In twelve areas of competence the students are confronted with the different facets of design as a discourse and as a discipline as well. Thus practice-oriented sketching connects itself with new research perspectives; thus in addition, networks and social relations develop, the ability to work in a team and to communicate are continuously tested, lived and constantly improved. In a unique way the students of the KISD develop self-responsible work as well as the ability to cooperate ? essential requirements for the designers. They not only have to develop a multiplicity of interfaces, but also they have to be able to think in terms possibilities, to create and to articulate. Therefore our education promotes and demands a multitude of additional competences: writing, reading and analysing text, the critical attitude towards imagery, and the cooperative interaction with colleagues. Designers must ask, question, listen, take risks, but of course also make mistakes and every now and then and be able to say goodbye to an idea in the process of development if needed. And in the end, of course, it is about the ability to represent their own results, not only with profound competence, but also with enthusiasm.

After an extended planning phase in spring 2002, the team begun in late summer 2002 to systematically collect old and create new content. To this end, they used a central FileMaker Pro database, the so called Screenbook. This made it possible to map old pages on the new structures and to prepare new content for the site. The HTML templates, the pictures and the style sheets were prepared as soon as the collection of content had progressed far enough. At time of conversion, the old site consisted of approximately 500 German, partly dynamical pages; all old URLs had to be preserved, and we wanted to be in the position of redirecting requests to the new URLs as to be compatible with old bookmarks, search engine entries, etc.

The decision to realise the website with TYPO3 was made some two weeks before the planned launch, when we first recognized TYPO3. The technical implementation of the templates and the necessary development of plug-ins took place on the basis of an installation of a TYPO3 test site within five days.

In order to realise the envisioned launch date, all members of the team collaborated simultaneously in copying content from the FileMaker Pro database into TYPO3. The conversion of the old site to the new proceeded as planned and without any incidents.

Approximately ten editors work on the further maintenance of the content. It is, however, likely, and easy to accomplish with TYPO3, that the work will be distributed among more teams. They will then solely be responsible for maintaining their part of the website, e.g. the Press Team (public relations) will look after their press releases. It is further planned to administer all TYPO3 accounts and groups via faculty?s LDAP server so that everyone is able to maintain his or her own pages.

Characteristics and requirements

Feeding the site with content and its overall care is the duty of a working group consisting of both junior and senior students with very different backgrounds and knowledge. Technical support and further development is realised mostly by the authors on voluntary basis.

KISD owns several servers of varying platforms and offers its students, employees and teachers, some 800 users altogether, many services. First of all the intranet which is a self-development on basis of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) supports education in a wide array of fields. For students abroad, the intranet, beside e-mail, is very often the only means to learn of the latest developments and to keep abreast with what is going on at KISD and in Cologne. Web interfaces for all important services provide world-wide access to e-mail, projects or discussions. This infrastructure must be supported by any new system. The production systems offer communication services and mass storage besides the web services. Any new software solution, therefore, has to limit its strain on existing resources to a minimum and needs to operate reliably with all other installed services and components on the existing hardware. As long as no self-developed programme is available, KISD supports and relies on open source software for all projects. Software components of new solutions should, thus, be available as open source.

Open source software components currently in use at the KISD

Monthly total traffic of KISD web services runs at about 10 GB, approximately 1/3 for the public website and 2/3 for the intranet. Internal and external e-communication results in nearly four GB traffic per month.

Apart from the usual requirements of a WCMS, there are also some individual services and functions within the KISD site which require development of own plug-ins and libraries. We were, however, fortunate to keep costs to a minimum, since it is very simple to use or convert existing PHP scripts for individual functions within TYPO3. The integration of existing services, applications and micro sites has also high priority, not at last because of the large amount of existing student projects websites. A WCMS should not require any revision but has to integrate both pages and projects into the site. The system needs to provide for authors with only minimum knowledge to be in the position of revising documents. Ease of use is essential for the success and the further development of the site, since the technically skilled members of the group will no longer be busy looking after the site but can concentrate on its further development. A multilingual version of the site, with at least an English version of the pages, is required to give also non-German speakers a chance to have a look at its content. Further, it must be possible to establish different groups with different rights within the site in order to grant the authors access to individual pages. Only by using such a method, each group is able to maintain ?its? section within KISD?s website. Another important aspect is the so-called ?document life cycle?; it is especially crucial because of the structure and working methods of each working group. Authors should be able to easily determine whether documents have become obsolete and are in the need of revision.

Most content of the intranet can also be viewed on the public website. Thus news messages are generated in the intranet, the KISD calendar is maintained with HTML masks in the intranet, and personal entries or the project archive (see below) are also classic applications of KISD?s intranet. In this context, the simple integration of custom PHP scripts in TYPO3 is an advantage; the cost for the representation of these internal information on the public site is minimalised. It is planned to create more of these cross connections and so to make all interesting and relevant information from the different areas of the intranet available to the public, taking into consideration the different target groups, user requirements and privacy needs. On top of this, many different and technical advanced functionalities should be integrated.

Reuse of content and services

The intranet of KISD is its own development. It is based on Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) and LDAP and is the result of a self-initiative. The service that has evolved over the years has become almost indispensable for teaching. It is maintained and continuously refined by a few people on a voluntary basis. The consequence of the planned migration of the intranet into a TYPO3 site should be that the requirements (multilingual pages, straight-forward editing of pages by groups with different responsibilities, and swift development of extensions) are easily met. At the same time, the current developers should be able to reduce the time they need for maintenance and support. TYPO3 extensions and the ?kickstarter? help to bridge to gap between existing scripts and new technology and offer a perspective for speedy advancement.

KISD intranet areas. (dark blue = static documents, blue = dynamically created, light blue = partly dynamically generated, green = third party software)

Current areas of the KISD intranet as indiviual modules		Planned areas of the the KISD intranet mixed with TYPO3 modules

Flash header

The Flash movie in the page header may have an individual background picture on each page. TYPO3 helped to realise this rather comfortably. The individual pages are supplemented by JPEG pictures (in the appropriate format) as resources. With the release of the page, a script tests the existence of a JPEG file in the page resources. If an appropriate entry does exist, it is further confirmed whether a SWF bitmap of the same name is available in the file system and if this is the case, it is delivered. If no SWF bitmap is available, the script automatically produces one using the MING library of PHP and stores it in the file system. Together with small teaser images, the SWF bitmap is loaded at run-time into the Flash movie and varies from page to page. Thanks to recursive search, it is, however, not necessary to explicitly assign a picture to each page. In case of a visitor without Flash plug-in, the appropriate JPEG picture is overlaid with the KISD word mark (put down as alpha channel in a PNG file) using ImageMagick and likewise stored in the file system. The visitor then receives this static JPEG file. Since all pictures are created once only with the first call of the page, after which they exist as static file, the thereby generated load on the server is insignificant.

LDAP

In order to display personal details about KISD people, the internal LDAP server is queried with appropriate PHP scripts. Together with public project archives planned for the middle of 2003, this service and the integration into TYPO3 will gain significance. Individual directory pages for KISD staff and students are in the mid-term also created with the LDAP directory service. This makes it possible to keep vital information like telephone and room numbers as well as consulting hours always up-to-date. Since this system of displaying and administering in the intranet has already performed well for years, a short deployment period is likely.

Archive

The project archive is a substantial component of the website. Almost all mid-term exams and diplomas as well as other numerous projects and seminars are available as PDF documents at least together with an appropriate database entry. These were published in an archive database and/or are accessible for search through the intranet. In the incoming version, the management of these project documentations is likely to be integrated completely into the intranet. Using the external site for search purposes will then be possible. An additional extension regarding other types of media needs to meet the requirements of the digital documents that are produced during the training.

Access and security

TYPO3 flexible architecture and its compliance with the given conditions made the choice for TYPO3 as our WCMS framework easy; even when compared with any self-development.

With the help of a browser, the administration of the external website is possible from any location without restrictions. In future, all configuration and administrative interfaces will only operate via secured connections (HTTPS). The internal website can be administered only in parts using a browser; files that have been altered locally have to be copied to the servers during SSH/SFTP sessions. At this point, as with the planned integration of LDAP, KISD?s single-sign-on concept will bear fruits as it will enable all users to access any open resource with just a single account. From the administration?s point of view, this results in a considerable alleviation and time-efficiency when it comes to account administration.

Looking ahead

With the current development of the project archive it is also planned to bring together several parallel information architectures. The next step would be the migration of the intranet to TYPO3. In combination with the central directory services of the University of Applied Sciences Cologne, these services will offer quick access to all information about KISD. In addition, the tools provided by TYPO3 help to spread the care and development of new applications equally among a larger group. Using TYPO3, it will be also possible to put more effort into the development of new, innovative and useful services for the members of the KISD since they are embedded in a reliable framework and a sizeable share of the otherwise needed preparations does not apply. In addition, the varying possibilities already existing in TYPO3 make it possible for less experienced people to create sheets, embed inquiries into pages or develop special pages on request. Especially at a public design school, this proves to be quite a big advantage. Quite often it is this background which allows for innovative projects and ideas being carried out without having to drawn upon the financial and personnel resources prevalent in industry.

Authors

Andreas Beutel ab(AT)mbfg.de
Marian Steinbach ms(AT)mbfg.de
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