Unfolding the Archive – Calendar
This phase continues from the three prototypes previously developed as part of Unfolding the Archive project by The Nieuwe Instituut. Following a workshop held at the Nieuwe Instituut focussed on user testing and evaluation, the Calendar View was selected for deeper refinement and was further developed.
The Calendar View is a metadata-driven temporal interface that displays records according to when they were created. The visualisation displays 14 projects by MVRDV, showing the time of day that drawings, images, and documents were created, emphasising periods of inactivity that reveal moments of consultation, permissions, or other non-creation periods.
The temporal approach reveals work patterns, project dynamics, file relationships, and archiving patterns that remain hidden in traditional file browsing interfaces. Time proximity between files, production spikes, and moments of inactivity become legible when organized by when things were created rather than what they are.
