Overview

Energyphile is a deep, thoughtful look at energy throughout human history. This online museum of energy artifacts and stories focuses on energy-centered, research-based exploration.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

Energyphile’s founder, Peter Tertzakian, believes that “there has to be a better way to discuss energy issues.” Peter’s collection of energy stories reimagine how we can discuss energy issues in a constructive way, while challenging our perspectives about the sector.

Peter wanted to present his stories in a way that provided connections and relationships among his collection, including historical artifacts and antiques from his personal library, without creating information overload through a static database without any engagement. Collection display is typically limited to static, linear grid structure, not dynamic, with limited storytelling capabilities.

The Solution

Energyphile settled on the idea of building a human-centred platform designed to showcase Peter’s collection. The organization wanted to work with a company capable of providing data visualizations that will connect relationships between energy stories, and VizworX's background in data visualization made them a perfect fit. By working with a software solutions company, Peter's vision of a digital collection space could be brought to life.

The results

PhileSpace capitalizes on our natural curiosity and instinct for storytelling. The platform encourages user-led exploration while displaying content in a dynamic, integrated interface. It also helps show connections between objects and stories, leading to increased understanding of energy and what drives it. These “forces of change” allow users to comprehend the impact and source of the disruption.

A museum can present its entire collection, a company its corporate legacy, a non-profit the story  of its benefactors and projects, a sports team its history, a family its photos and so on. Educational  institutions can publish their materials as collections of knowledge, just like a new-age textbook.

Philespace deconstructs content down to “blocks” through that can customized. It’s a dynamic, user-led platform that gives galleries, museums, legacy projects, and more the power to curate and display their collections in a unique new way.

Metrics

Over the last year, over 26,000 unique users have visited the PhileSpace site and an additional 3,000 new unique visitors visit the site every month. These users have spent over a combined 2000 hours on PhileSpace enjoying its wide array of content.

PhileSpace has also received positive feedback from users and several companies and museums are interested in using the platform to display their own collections. These new tenants include:

• Heritage Park, which is a historical park within Calgary
• Contemporary Calgary, which is a public contemporary art gallery
• ENERGYminute, an organization educating the public through visualization 

The Technology

PhileSpace is built with React, using custom logic and canvas technology to properly organize and display data fetched by Apollo Client. The back end uses MySQL to store data, paths to assets and a complex tagging structure.

Disruptive Factor

Philespace has reinvented digital storytelling, giving those with collections a powerful new way to curate and present their collections, to draw connections among the objects, to offer their users a much more engaging, user-led experience. The platform presents collections in a way that shows connections, illustrates themes and tells stories that are larger than the objects themselves.

PhileSpace is helping increase interactivity and accessibility in an industry where attitudes towards technology are starting to change and shift, through its patented visualization (seen in its dynamic visual format), advanced data architecture and no-wait cloud driven access.

Shining Moment

VizworX worked closely with the Energyphile team to develop PhileSpace. Everything in the solution is custom and PhileSpace already has several patents for industrial design, with others pending.