Carnegie Labs

Project Description

As is the custom for a number of development teams, we needed a good April Fool's prank. During my first year at Carnegie, I found that the only April Fool's custom was an alternate version of our weekly internal newsletter, where we would write various short satirical articles. For April Fool's 2015, I contributed something related to our transition between Learning Management Systems. It was a hit, and I had a personal visit by the Carnegie president to praise the article. For April Fool's 2016, I wanted to raise the bar, and that's how Carnegie Labs was born.

Carnegie Labs was both a real and fake concept. My team, Collaborative Technology, worked on the basement floor of the building, along with our Analytics and IT teams. Although we are a part of Carnegie, we've always considered ourselves separate in terms of culture and quirkiness. I wanted to highlight this in a website for April Fool's. In my opinion, quirkiness and innovativeness are praised and highlighted by many companies, especially with startups. So for the website, I pitched Carnegie Labs as a vague consulting startup that not only helped the Carnegie Foundation but also helped design iconic bridges and buildings in major cities. I made the language as generically "startup" as I could, and even picked a template that had a lot of the stereotypical startup website features, like parallax scrolling.

With a little help from my colleague Kenneth Fernandez, who handled the new logo and helped with some of the design, I wrote the code and the content over the course of 2-3 months. This was an extracurricular project, so my only time to work on it was after work and weekends. On the day of, I sent a company-wide email saying that Carnegie Labs was breaking away from the rest of the foundation. We also made a banner with the Carnegie Labs logo, which we hung at the entrance to our floor. I bought inflatable dinosaurs and placed them around our space. I also bought an assortment of retro sodas and snacks to offer those who ventured down to our floor. Carnegie Labs was an even bigger hit, and I had another personal visit by the president to praise the site and concept.

Backend

I purchased the domain name "carnegielabs.org" in order to make it as official-sounding as possible (and in case Carnegie Labs became a real thing). I set up a simple hosting environment. This was a quick project, so I kept it as a static site with no server-side code.

Frontend

To develop the site as quickly as possible, I chose a generic Bootstrap template that already had many of the components I needed. I had to add parallax scrolling and some modals.

Design Decisions

A few colleagues and I sat down and brainstormed what design stereotypes came to mind when we thought about startups, and these morphed into the content featured on the site.