In this project, I have been engaged by Prof. Dr Tan Sooi Beng & Ms. Sumetha Nagalingam, as the front end web developer & interaction designer for their multicultural research project. The project was previously funded by Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) RU Grant, and it was headed by Prof. Tan herself and the faculty of School of The Arts. The research project was about exploring a sustainable way to document all the living heritage of Penang through the perspective of crafts, festivities, performing arts and food before they all rendered obsolete. The project had took the research team for more than 3 years to complete their fieldwork, as some of the festivities and performances only happen in certain season of the year.
As a web designer cum front end developer, the main requirement of my service was to structurally archive all the documented field works in the form of website for both internal and external consumption. Due to the mass amount of time-based data that this project had, I have to develop the site into the form of rich internet application (RIA) for the ease of multimedia playback and better streaming performances at different bandwidth. This approach shall help to maintain a consistent user experience for the site as it would work across all kinds of web browser. Also, this catalogue-style of RIA can be deployed as a cross-platform desktop application.
Besides the usual graphic design works and codings, I have also rendered additional photography service and my own stock photos to support this project, as a value-added service. I was quite happy and felt proud to be part of this project for I get to contribute to Penang’s multiculturalism which it is being accorded as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Demo
The website is still being hosted on the server of School of The Arts since its deployment in five years ago. You can check out the live site through the above-highlighted linking. Alternately, just in case, the portal gets to retire, you can preview the mechanics of this website through the following recorded demo.
