We live in a world of abundant space; no matter where you are in the world, you are likely to look around and identify spaces for housing, sidewalks, parks, and more. It is not until we situate ourselves within these spaces that those spaces become places, the house becomes the home, the sidewalk becomes the stage for the meet-cute, the abstract space develops a concrete and personal meeting.

Places embody the hearts of the communities within them; they are areas that spark a sense of belonging and facilitate connection. However, as our world evolves and becomes more globalized, our definition of place has also expanded into the digital realm. The internet has become a world of abundant space, therefore, it is now more important than ever to design digital spaces that reflect the communities that they inhabit.

From the moment the homepage of Innis College’s newly launched website appears, a diverse array of students are splashed in a montage across your screen. They are interacting with each other, throwing their heads back in laughter, engaging in deep conversations. They are also interacting within the various defining geographies of the college like the Innis Green and the Student Commons. Across these snapshots of everyday life, a pun that is just corny enough to be perfectly Innis stares back at you: “We’re Innis Together.”

On October 14th, 2021, Innis College launched its new website, one that was designed to emulate and serve the student community that lies at the heart of its being. This is in stark contrast to the website that had served Innisians in recent years: impersonal, static, and contained information and services diluted over eleven different websites. While it functioned as a digital space that gave its information to students—albeit, with a little savvy searching—it had yet to become a place that students could see themselves in.

When Innis College President Charlie Keil began his term back in 2015, one of the very first objectives that he prioritized at his first Innis College Council meeting was a “redesign of an integrated college website.” Securing a web developer took time but by the winter of 2019, an all-star group composed of Keil and three other Innis administration members had formed, eager to take on the task of redesigning Innis’ virtual space from scratch.

“All of us who have been involved have lived and breathed that website for the past two years,” President Keil reminisced. “We met weekly—sometimes for meetings as long as three hours—and we continued that way for about a year and a half.”

As consumers, a website can often feel like merely a body that you inhabit to get where you need to go. What often goes unnoticed is the acute level of detail that goes into the colour scheme, the website headings, and all of the small details that are easily taken for granted. Ben Weststrate, Communications Officer at Innis College and a member of the website committee, gave us an insight into those details in an interview with The Herald.

“You hear these qualities about Innis College and see them substantiated over and over again [among the faculty and students]. Innis is tightly knit, it’s a sort of a warm place, it’s familiar, it’s a place where everybody knows your name. Those qualities resonated with us and we wanted to represent them within the website,” Weststrate explained.

Creating an authentic atmosphere for the website was key; therefore, just shortly after the website committee was formed, one staff and two student focus groups were established for consultation.

Keil explained, “Early on, we asked ourselves: Who is it for?; Who is your primary user group? We decided that the primary user group was students… That’s why the focus groups became so important… User testing was both about the aesthetics and the ethos [of the website], but it was also about the usability and applicability of all those characteristics.”

According to the website committee, this balance of capturing the “ethos” of Innis without providing an exhaustive amount of resources proved to be laborious, but it was important so that the website served the group dependent on it most. 

Weststrate elaborated, “The thing that anchored all of us throughout this process—the committee, the web developer, the copywriter—was that this was going to be a student-centred site… For example, under the ‘Student Services’ section, [the options] are framed around supports… The labels and precise language make it more intuitive for the students to find what they need.”

In terms of usability, this precise labelling and concentration of services in one place are what stand out the most compared to the old interface. Whereas the old website had six broad headings across the top and fourteen hyperlinks to other Innis/U of T services across the side, the new website has nine specific headings across the top that further break down into more niche resources. As it stands, a student would have to get work to get lost in this organized, digestible digital space.

Earlier this year, The Varsity published an opinion piece on the disparities between the federated and constituent colleges under U of T’s broader college system. In the piece, the author wrote that Innis College’s website, while not as outdated as its other constituent counterparts, was “similarly outdated and off-putting.”

Since its conception, Innis College has always been an institution that fought to establish a well-defined space for its students to thrive within. In a conversation with one of Innis College’s first presidents Peter Russell earlier this year, he explained to me that when Innis College was establishing itself in the 1960s, it lacked a physical space: “In the early days, it was a college with a principal and a governing council—no students yet, no building!”. 

Years later, when Russell was offered the presidency in 1971, he told then-President Claude Bissell that he would accept the role but only if Bissell “guaranteed him the $1.5 million it would cost to build a new building for the college.” While many faculty and students at the time argued that a new building was unnecessary, Russell said, “It was time for Innis College to have a home, for the sake of its students and our identity.”

50 years later, this new website rebranding and the highly-anticipated expansion and renovation project of the college’s physical building are both extensions of that desire to strengthen Innis College’s identity. 

“[The relaunch is] not about resurrection or damage control or a decision that comes from this sort of deficit—it’s quite the opposite of that,” Weststrate concluded, “In both a virtual space or a physical space, we are going to create an environment within which the community can do what it does best—you know, [we’re] giving it the space that it’s due to continue to thrive and grow. That’s the business I am interested in.”