Philip Forget

Thrive is a national design initiative whose aim is to put an end to poverty in rural America. The designers at thrive aim to do this through design and business practice education made available locally in some of the poorest regions of the country.

The design for thrive's online presence centered around the idea of a design system or algorithm. The system was created to allow for flexibility to enable sub-sites and pages to play with the aesthetic characteristics of the framework while retaining the formal and semantic elements. The design becomes a meta-design, a design as well as a canvas for adaptive works to resonate with and emerge from.

The design is composed of three layers. The first layer consists of the primary information of the current page, the most granular and precise information layer. The third layer is a canvas for evocative imagery taken from the local surroundings of the thrive offices. The second layer is made up of the navigational, interactive, and branding elements which serve to symbolically and physically tie the first and third layers together through layering, threshold, and aperture.

A small portfolio site for the artist Gregory Kalliche. The layout and execution of the site serve to emphasize the artistic language of the work presented while staying balanced and neutral.

The navigation for the site serves as both the threshold seperating present state and the work as well as a navigational history. Each new child element shifts to register with it's parent. Each page can be one of two themes, light or dark. Double clicking on any single image will toggle the theme of the page to better present each piece of work.

The Clinical & Translational Science Center at Weill Cornell Medical College serves to connect physicians with patients, students with researchers, and staff with the resources provided by the CTSC grant. To accommodate such a broad user base and yet specific audience requirements, an audience based navigation structure was adopted.

The centerpiece of the main homepage consists of a mosaic of images from the CTSC, each corresponding to a specific audience type. As a user hovers over the audience choices, a descriptive paragraph explains the resources available within the specific homepage. The mosaic will iterate through the navigation choices in the absence of user interaction, acting similarly to a slideshow.

The homepage acts as a filter for discovering all of the tools and resources the CTSC has to offer each member of the visiting audience. Separate homepages are provided for each audience type to further assist in connecting the user to the resources most relevant to their needs. CTSC news and events are populated by AJAX from a remote server.

Audience specific homepages further serve to identify the resources that are particular to specific audience members. A custom javascript slideshow component is the primary element of these pages, cycling through and briefly explaining the resources within the site that may be of use to a particular user. This discovery mechanism provides a digest of the features encompassed by the CTSC.

Audience specific news and events are pulled and filtered from a remote database asynchronously. A larger selection of featured resources is also provided to supplement the discovery mechanism as well as links to resources outside the CTSC.

The footer for the CTSC site includes a full sitemap overlay which can be accessed from anywhere to quickly reach any page on the site. The footer also includes quick access to contact information, directions, and related sites.

The interior navigation is separated into three categories to reduce the levels of hierarchy available for content. These relationships are exposed as child, parent :: child, and grandparent :: parent :: child relationships. The styling and folding for these relationships is handled by a javascript component through the simple use of body classes. In this way, designers can simply specify the page classes and have the styling and classes automatically applied. This javascript behavior falls back to a completely usable form if javascript is not available.

<body class="about_us">

<body class="about_us key_functions">

<body class="about_us key_functions ctru">

The conflicts management tool was designed to meet the needs of Weill Cornell in their effort to track the financial entity conflicts of employees to ensure compliance with federal regulations. Conceived, designed and prototyped in only a 2 week period, the application is a fully functional platform for tracking financial disclosures

A custom LDAP authentication backend was developed to incorporate directly into the existing credentials schema of the university. Several python utilities were developed to facilitate recurring administrative tasks available to be automated through the use of cron jobs or other system calls.

The first view into the application is a users deck. From here, users can track progress and access their disclosures.

The application takes a unique approach to tracking financial incentive conflict management. Through the use of the entity manager, a user can track their evolving relationship with outside companies and institutions over the lifetime of their work at the university.

By filling out a form created within the application through the admin interface, a normal use fills out and edits this form over time as new entities are added or existing ones are edited. All edits are versioned and are accessible to the admin to monitor the evolving relationships between employees and outside institutions.

The entities manager allows for the creation of new entities and the editing of existing ones. Here we see a sample entity being created with a simplified questionnaire created in the admin interface. As changes are made to existing entities, snapshots of the entities are saved in order to provide a full picture of the relationship of the employees with their entities over time.

Two types of financial conflicts are tracked within the application. The first are annual disclosure forms, which must be filled out every year by all employees of the college. The second tracks those specific financial disclosures required to be filled out with every study carried out at the college.

These study specific disclosures are automatically generated when a new study is created in the system. A mechanism was developed to allow for another application to notify the COI module of incoming studies, currently tracked by COEUS.

The conflicts management page includes a comprehensive list of the current and ongoing conflict disclosures of each user. From here the user can view, edit, submit and reopen both study-specific and annual disclosures. Once a disclosure is submitted, it is locked from further action and an administrator is notified that the disclosure must be reviewed.

To edit a disclosure, a user simply drags in the entities relevant to the disclosure. From there they can either add notes, upload documents, and save or submit the disclosure. The notes and documents serve as a conversational mechanism between the user and CFR admins in order to facilitate and document the process of bringing disclosures into compliance.

State changes in disclosures are automatically noted and added to the conversation as a time-stamped mechanism for tracking the disclosure over time. These state changes are also emailed to the user and placed in their deck. Documents are versioned as they are uploaded. Documents can be opened on the server in each user's folder for admins to access from their operating system.

Along with the ability of users to fill out questionnaires and submit them for review, a complete admin side was developed to review, process and communicate between the CFR offices and users. Beyond reviewing applications and generating reports, the admin module allows for the creation, editing, and automatic versioning of all forms and questionnaires deployed in the application.

Along with the aforementioned functionality that each user has, the admin also has a specific area only available to them. The first page in this section is similar to the user deck, but contains all disclosures that are awaiting admin review. From here, the admin can filter and search for applications by question, answer, user, state or any other information included in the disclosure.

As an admin reviews an application, they have full access to the entities disclosed as well as the full versioned history of those entities. From there an admin can add notes, attach resolution documents and change the state of the disclosure to compliant or push it back to the user to make changes in order to become compliant.

The conflicts management application also includes a powerful questionnaire creation, editing, and versioning tool. From here, the conflicts office can independantly create the forms and questionnaires deployed across the application. These questionnaires are automatically versioned as they are edited and created.

A key part of the application, the questionnaire editing tool allows for the creation and editing of forms deployed on the application. From here, new questions can be created with a rich tactile editor that is truly an approximation of what the deployed form will resemble.

SuperGlued is a social networking site for music lovers and concert goers which gives it's users the ability to share pictures, videos, and stories about concert events they have been to or will be attending. Project responsibilities included a re-envisioning of the site architecture, restructuring of principle navigation and a general overhaul of the html, css and javascript components. A new heads up notification system was created to unobtrusively pass system messages to the user.