A new shopfront, a memory that breathes

There are two ways to redo a shopfront. The first is to change the glass. The second is to turn the lights on over what was always inside. We chose the second.

As of this week, noslab.it wears a new dress. Whoever passes by no longer finds three photographs in a row, but a gallery: each work has its own room, with the site in the large frame and, beside it, the phone with the app that lives around it. Because this is what we build, and the shopfront finally had to say it: not websites, but complete digital organisms, where the site, the management app, the community and the administration breathe together. In the lab the workbench of tools glides by, the mark at the entrance has taken body and turns slowly on itself, and there is always someone at the bench: NosAI, the workshop’s assistant, who welcomes whoever comes in and truly answers, at any hour.

And in the shopfront, as of this week, there is also a new product.

Out of the workshop comes the digital coordinator of a territory’s culture and history. Not a website, not an archive, not a management app: all three together, tailored to one precise territory. The membership card always in your pocket. The archive that does not sleep in a basement but lets itself be visited, questioned, enriched. The map of the places that matter and of the benefits for those who take part. The spaces where the community gathers. And a digital keeper who greets members by name, in the language of the place: because every territory has its own voice, and none deserves to be flattened.

The first incarnation was born in the Noce valleys, and it bears the name of El Brenz.

El Brenz is the association that keeps, studies and shares the history, the language and the culture of Val di Non, Val di Sole, Val di Rabbi and Val di Pejo. The roots of Anaunian Ladin, as its motto goes: raìs fonde no le ‘nglacia, deep roots do not freeze. From today those roots have their own app: the membership card, the Museum of the Great War with the valleys’ photographs and relics, the map, the community. Watching over it is Andreas, the association’s digital keeper, who greets members in their own language.

It is the craft we love most: taking the memory of a territory and giving it a digital home everyone can inhabit. The shopfront shows, the work keeps.

If you too look after the memory of a place, an association, an archive, a community, tell us your idea: the coordinator of your territory can be born in the workshop. In the meantime, come and see the living one at elbrenz.eu.