From a historic site to a digital space

by mediale pfade

“Departure Neuaubing”: a media approach to learning
The app “Departure Neuaubing” sets out to make the topic of Nazi forced labor accessible to as broad a group of users as possible. Assuming varying degrees of prior knowledge about the subject and differing online media habits, it uses a wide range of media and communicative formats. Stories are told through text, photos, films, a visual novel, and interactive maps, thus enabling users to engage with the website in very specific ways.
The web app adds a digital, interactive dimension to the Munich Documentation Centre’s educational work and offers multiple learning opportunities. The history of forced labor under the Nazis is examined from different perspectives, which are linked in many ways – both technically and thematically. The primary focus is the European dimension of forced labor. Tags, indexes of people, places, and subjects, and a glossary are used to highlight the many connections. In addition, text and image forums give users the opportunity to make their own contributions to the website. To reach as many people as possible “Departure Neuaubing” is designed as an open-source learning platform. Free access to information is of paramount importance if an active discussion is to be sustained about the meaning and the continuing regional, national, and international impact of the history Nazi forced labor until today.
The media-based learning concept combines two approaches: first of all, to make the basic content and the artistic engagements with the context of Nazi forced labor accessible, various media are used to shape and present the material. Historical, biographical, and topological data then form reference points for cross-linking, sorting, and filtering topics. Users are thus able to take either a topic- or a media-based approach to the information. In addition, tagging, links, and a structured search function allow a more targeted use of the app. “Departure Neuaubing” thus allows both an exploratory and a more planned approach.
The web app draws on current practices such as storytelling, mediatization, media convergence, and tagging via hashtags that have become established in social networks and condition people’s everyday media experience, especially that of young people. The increasing importance of visualization in a digitalized world offers new ways of learning. These can take the form of topic-driven active media engagement in which the learners themselves produce maps, photos, and descriptions or add to existing ones. Documents and sources have two functions here: on the one hand they serve as media through which to acquire information; on the other, through additional contextualization and artistic and journalistic perspectives, they can in themselves constitute learning materials; for example, they may teach us how to take a critical approach to sources. “Departure Neuaubing” thus addresses not only the history of Nazi forced labor but also the fact that history is always told from a particular perspective and is thus by nature constructed.
Last, but not least, the web app allows users to personalize the presentation of the material and to use the disabled access settings. The app’s tested design creates a specific user experience in which visitors are guided through the app by animation and interactive elements and invited to participate by submitting their own contributions.

by operative.space

Three aspects are central in the design of the website: 1) to address the topic of Nazi-era forced labor as a series of “breaks and continuities”, 2) to allow users to engage easily with the topic through a low-threshold approach, and 3) to use “interaction” to open up experiential spaces for individual artistic perspectives.

Typography makes language and hence textual content accessible, i.e., legible, but it also contains stories, contexts, and associations of its own that are only rarely immediately recognizable in the form of the lettering. When a designer decides to use a certain typeface, the content dimension is always a consideration alongside formal-aesthetic aspects, often one of which he or she is not aware. “Departure Neuaubing” is conceived as a history project in a digital space. The typographic design therefore references both the historical context of the project and the digital form in which the material is conveyed. It does so by combining two very different typefaces—Elisabeth Regular and Lexend.

“Elisabeth Regular” is a typeface that was commissioned in 1928 and completed in 1938. It was designed by Elizabeth Friedländer and was originally supposed to be published under her surname, as was customary at the time. But after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Friedländer was asked by the Bauer Type Foundry to publish the typeface not under her Jewish surname but as “Elisabeth-Antiqua.”[1] The same year Friedländer lost her job and had to emigrate to Italy. In 1939 she fled to London, where she worked as a designer for the resistance against Nazi Germany by producing forged German printed matter.[2]
“Lexend,” by contrast, is a typeface designed to improve the textual flow.[3] In its clear and simply formal language the type is designed with our various perceptual faculties in mind. Being able to access the content is hence primary.

These aspects of the two typefaces—readability on the one hand and the historic reference on the other—are combined in the lettering of the title to create a distinctive appearance.

Whereas when we read a book our interaction is limited to turning the pages, the limits of the digital are apparently virtual and yet set very narrowly by habit. Part of the design concept is to shift this expectation a little, to expand it, and thus make individual contributions experiential. The images are truncated, suggesting that there is more, thus encouraging users to rearrange the material. Context and complexities, content and formal tensions can be found behind the links and side bars: an invitation to immerse ourselves in the material, to critically question it, to broaden our perspective, and to make connections. The design is committed to this approach.

[1] Andreas Hansert, Georg Hartmann (1870-1954): Biographie eines Frankfurter Schriftgiessers, Bibliophilen und Kunstmäzens, Vienna 2009, p. 114.
[2] Online-Artikel: Maev Kennedy, Exhibition celebrates wartime artist famous for Mills & Boon covers, in The Guardian, Dec. 26, 2017 (accessed Jan 16, 2022).
[3] Online: Bonnie Shaver-Troup, Thomas Jockin, Santiago Orozco, Héctor Gómez, Superunion, LEXEND font, 2019.