Bildungsmythen in der langen Geschichte der DDR

The BBF | Research Library for the History of Education at DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education commissioned us to create a website for the knowledge transfer of the joint research project “Bildungsmythen über die DDR – eine Diktatur und ihr Nachleben” (Educational myths about the GDR – a dictatorship and its afterlife). The research projects of BBF and three universities are investigating and questioning six myths about the GDR’s education system.

One of the concepts mentioned during the first workshop was the rhizome, a non-hierarchical organization that allows to discover the many facets of the different myths and research projects in a playful and intuitive way. We developed a system of cards on the home page that appear randomly each time the page is reloaded, which we called “the cloud”. You can move the cards around the page or click on them to access the content of the page. It is also possible to call up a list view, which is also loaded randomly and without a defined hierarchical system. Each of the six myths on which the research projects were carried out is assigned a color, which structures the information and distinguishes the elements of the cloud from one another.

Using the menu, users can navigate the site in the traditional way and find all the cards of the clouds, organized according to the associated myths and research projects.