Focus: Building the digital archive of CIID’s first 20 years and making its design legacy accessible, searchable and engaging.

As CIID marks its first 20 years, we are looking for a Digital Archive Designer to help us collect, structure and bring to life two decades of interaction design projects, experiments and ideas.

We are looking for a young interaction designer or design researcher who is genuinely interested in the history and evolution of interaction design and can recognise what makes a project significant. The role combines research, information architecture, digital organisation and storytelling, with the opportunity to explore how a large design archive can become an engaging digital experience.

Key responsibilities

• Build and structure a searchable digital archive/database of CIID work.
• Collect, organise and document 2,000+ IDP (Interaction Design Programme) projects and other relevant CIID projects from the past 20 years.
• Develop a meaningful taxonomy and tagging system covering themes, technologies, methods, faculty, students, year, context and other relevant dimensions.
• Locate and consolidate existing project documentation, images, videos, prototypes and descriptions.
• Fill gaps through research and, where relevant, interviews with CIID alumni, faculty and staff.
• Create consistent project records and metadata.
• Explore and prototype ways for users to navigate, search and discover relationships within the archive.
• Contribute to defining how the archive could eventually become public-facing, for example through the CIID website or a dedicated digital experience.
• Identify thematic stories, connections and trajectories across 20 years of interaction design at CIID.

What you will learn

The internship offers hands-on experience at the intersection of interaction design, design research, information architecture, digital archiving and storytelling.

You will learn how to transform a large and diverse body of design work into a structured, searchable and meaningful resource, developing skills in taxonomy, metadata, research, documentation and digital content organisation.

You will also have the opportunity to engage with CIID’s international network of alumni, faculty and practitioners, gaining a unique perspective on how interaction design, technologies and design practices have evolved over the past two decades.

Ideal profile

We are looking for a recent graduate or student in interaction design, communication design, design research or a related field, with strong organisational and analytical instincts and a genuine interest in the history and evolution of interaction design.

You should enjoy working with both systems and stories: comfortable organising complex bodies of information while also recognising what makes a project, idea or moment interesting and significant.

An interest in information architecture, taxonomy, digital archives, databases and digital storytelling is particularly relevant. 

The CIID environment

The internship is based at CIID’s home in the historic Monastero di Astino in Bergamo, working alongside the Interaction Design Programme and CIID’s international community of students, designers, faculty and visiting professionals.

CIID brings together young professionals from around the world, making English part of everyday working life and offering plenty of opportunities to build international connections.

Throughout the year, international designers and professionals come to CIID to teach, collaborate and share their work. Interns are part of the CIID community and are welcome to join talks, presentations and other learning opportunities taking place during their time with us.

The CIID facilities also include physical workshops for prototyping, making and experimenting with technology, which can be accessed where relevant and based on demonstrated skills.