Re:Collection Platform Strategy and Design

The Azrieli Foundation is devoted to supporting Holocaust education across Canada, primarily by publishing the memoirs of Canadian Holocaust survivors. The memoirs are rich with photographs, letters, home movies and other artefacts. Riddle Films was engaged to create short films of survivors’ stories, including archival material, present-day interviews and animated storytelling. All of this material gave The Foundation a wealth of incredible content, which formed the basis for designing a digital experience that would keep the survivors’ voices alive for future generations of Canadians.

We began with understanding the needs of the target audience. This was achieved through primary research with Holocaust educators that indicated the need to make Holocaust education and artefacts relatable to young people without cultural or historical context around the events that took place in Europe in the 1940s. The digital experience needed to be engaging, emotional and accurate. We based the design on identifying universal human themes, such as family, childhood, discrimination and survival, and then build flows around the memoirs content to show how these themes are connected through the pictures and stories of individual survivors. Incorporating the ability for site visitors to make collections of the artefacts that resonate most with them added a level of personalization and reflection to the experience.