Media Majlis

The Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar is a museum dedicated to exploring journalism, communication and media. The museum is an active space, where a spectrum of stories and voices are heard.

Keepthinking designed and developed the new website to create connections between the physical exhibitions and the online content, with the Qi CMS used for collection management and web content management.

The museum’s primary mode of communication and the principal means for learning is its exhibitions. Therefore, the goals of building this bilingual English/Arabic website revolved around the curatorial programme: providing information on the current exhibitions and a calendar of events accompanying the displays, whilst offering users ways to explore related content.

The new website complements and expands the experience the visitors have on visiting the museum. Interpretive threads link important concepts within exhibition and website content. This allows users to follow themes in both the physical and online space, building a body of knowledge on important aspects that will, over time, be collated for student use.

A fluid, immersive experience that makes use of large imagery. Users are immediately displayed with the latest exhibition, and scroll to view current and upcoming events. The brand identity included a complete reversed layout to accommodate for arabic lettering, we brought this adaptation into the digital experience.

As a brand new museum project, Media Majlis had to define and understand their audiences. Research had been conducted on identifying, understanding and prioritizing possible, desired and probable audiences. From this research, it was clear that the museum will thrive more successfully if its global and regional lenses are locally rooted, and whilst making accessibility and engaging experiences a priority. These ideas help guide our design process. In the same way that the museum challenges standard narratives, we set out to explore ways of displaying online content. The ideas of fluidity and interconnection permeate the design and are expressed in a variety of ways.

Programmes coincide with long-term exhibitions, given that this was a new museum that at the time of designing hadn’t opened yet, it wasn’t necessary to have functionality to filter through events. Instead we created a user-serving interface to access information surrounding exhibitions and events, such as venue accessibility, credits for people involved in the talk/event/exhibition, downloadables and ‘threads’ which connected events with collection content, interviews and articles through a tagging system.

Online articles give the audience further insight into the content, collection and research of Media Majlis. Wanting to present themselves as a hub for open-ended, two sided conversations and points of views, the articles featured vary in subject and topics, with which we included a highlighted tag filter to allow the user to keep exploring topics relevant to what they want to see. We also provided a linear exploration of content through a ‘previous/next’ article view at the bottom of each page.

At Keepthinking, we had previous experience designing bilingual websites, however, this was our first Arabic site and this presented a fresh challenge, as the right to left reading and writing has design implications, having to switch the alignment of not only the content but also the navigation and logo. Another key element is the selection of imagery, which has wording over different parts of them when the content shifts languages.