I'm proud of... FIND: Forming Intersections & Dialogues

I'm really excited about FIND, a cultural lab we recently launched with New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. The project is designed to capture intersections and dialogues between artists, writers, scholars, designers, technologists and the UAE landscape in both a historical and contemporary context.

These are a few technical challenges that we're having a lot of fun solving:

the site is bilingual (Arabic & English), and it must display both languages at all times (as opposed to giving the user a choice, and only showing one)

the data model and CMS have to be flexible enough to enable the production of narrative content including a mixture of 2 column rich text elements; responsive HTML embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud; slideshows containing images, the HTML embeds, and 2 columns of captions; and single images with 2 column captions.

pull together site content as well as content from external social sources (currently Facebook, Twitter & Instagram) to create "universe" pages for the intersections, with a search bar incorporated into the logo/branding

The site has been built in Ruby on Rails, and uses the Twitter Bootstrap 3 framework. You can check it out here:

http:/​/​www.f-in-d.com/​

One of my favorite pieces right now is from filmmaker and NYU professor Mo Ogrodnik, where she weaves a story about exploring the bus station in Abu Dhabi:

http:/​/​www.f-in-d.com/​stories/​abu-dhabi-bus-station

Within the Notebook section, we'll be contributing technical posts related to our experience with building FIND. The first post shows how we tackled the bilingual implemention requirements.