IDA Platform
Our design legacy will reach a tangible audience via a specialized database created to foster knowledge and promote its exchange. Innovative and accessible, the platform contains thousands of resources —images, videos, and audios— covering almost a century of Argentine design production through the perspectives of authors, companies, and institutions that have enriched the productive, project-related, and social history of the discipline.
Since 2018, IDA Foundation uses a digital platform –for internal organization and external networking purposes– that features online storage. Digital tools and their accessibility enable public outreach of archive material, an essential condition to boost training, production, promotion, and specialized reviews.
IDA has unified criteria related to documents and archives in order to create the patrimonial collections of authors, studios, companies, and institutions linked to national design. These collections include materials chosen for their territorial significance, integral quality, and functional, aesthetic, social, and technological innovation. Every piece, whether it is a poster designed by Guillermo González Ruiz for the Environmental Urban Plan, a W chair by César Jannello, a bulletin by CIDI or a garment by Varanasi, is the final link of a long history. As an institution devoted to research, IDA has undertaken the task of reshaping all these stories based on a systematic recording of the information related to both the product and the process it resulted from.
The archive comprises diverse elements, some represent an idea, others discarded options or unfinished products, yet others show lesser known versions of iconic pieces: among this map of possibilities, multiple connections, that surpass isolated authors, studios, or typologies, give way to diverse pathways, geographies, and circumstances merged in creative processes.
To enable easy access, through different ways, IDA had to implement an appropriate informatics tool, or a system to manage collections, that covered all present and future demands. Collective Access, an open code program, versatile and adaptable to specific institutional needs, was the selected option. This choice reflects core principles of IDA: to promote the democratization of knowledge and to establish international connections in order to find solutions to global challenges within particular contexts, as is Latin America.
