Rebranding Manufacturing.gov - An Interactive Case Study
Front-end, User Experience and Design
This track covers delivering projects focused on the most important audience—the end user. Learn how to leverage Drupal to help you keep abreast of emerging trends in the mobile, componentized Web world. We’ll show you strategies for fostering collaboration between content creators, designers, strategists, and end-users.
Manufacturing.gov is the national advanced manufacturing portal originally recommended in 2012 by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Steering Committee. The website was intended to serve as "a searchable database of manufacturing resources...a key mechanism to support access by small and medium-sized enterprises to enabling infrastructure."
Over time, the website became a repository of documents, announcements, and links related to federal government initiatives on advanced manufacturing, itself a little-understood term having to do with the introduction of information technology into the manufacturing process and/or the manufacturing of advanced products largely enabled by advances in IT. Much of the information related to the nascent National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), a network of manufacturing innovation institutes piloted beginning in 2012 and managed by a wide-ranging interagency team centered at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), part of the Department of Commerce.
As part of an overall effort to refocus, clarify and streamline web and communication operations, Manufacturing.gov became the subject of a web redesign effort beginning in approximately December 2014, which continues today. The goals of the redesign are to:
1. Return the website to its original intended purpose, e.g. re-establish and build upon a solid architecture for the site
2. Maintain and update the repository of information related to the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation
3. Engage and educate the public with regard to advanced manufacturing, reflecting a more accurate image for AM in the process
This interactive session will offer a glimpse into the content and process associated with the redesign, and engage the audience in providing input into this work-in-progress.