Listings
Located in the heart of New York, the College of Performing Arts (COPA) consists of Mannes School of Music, the iconic 100-year-old conservatory; the legendary New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the innovative and groundbreaking School of Drama.
The College of Performing Arts presents more than 600 public events each year, including multiple major presentations each month: opera and main stage theater productions, orchestra concerts at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, and other events involving high-profile guest artists or topics which are critical to the mission of the College. In addition to those marquee events, students present over 500 solo and ensemble projects each year.
I focused on making it possible for every student event to be listed on the college’s website event calendar and to include every event on monthly listings posters found in the front windows of the entrance to the College and in other places around campus. These listings posters serve to promote upcoming events to people in the building and passing by on the sidewalk. Additionally, there are points during each week where the College holds simultaneous performances in as many as six venues. The listings also serve to assist in wayfinding for concert goers
Listings Posters
24x36” Music Listing Poster
24x36” Jazz Listing Poster
24x36" Window Display Poster
Website Listing
Creating an administrative process to list and update more than 600 annual events on the web calendar was a major challenge. Student events are notoriously fluid and require updates to the website listing.
I didn’t have a staff of full time workers to devote to posting events and dealing with updates, but I did have bandwidth with student workers.
The platform that The New School uses as an online event calendar platform supports bulk uploading of events via CSV.
To best take advantage of this, I created a Jotform (shown below) to collect the details needed for the web listing from each performer. The Jotform was integrated with a google sheet (which matched the required upload format) where I wrote formulas to concatenate the form text into an event description.
My student workers simply needed to check the google sheet each day, download new entries in CSV format, upload and review.
As an exercise, I recreated the form functionality in an Axure RP prototype. I used global variables to collect the data and compile a confirmation page. I also made the form adaptive so it flows across a set of predetermined screen sizes.