ICD Research Assistant in Web Development

The University of Stuttgart was rolling out a standardized OpenCMS template across all its institutes and departments. This meant taking the ICD’s existing website, rich with years of research projects, publications, pavilion documentation, and team profiles, and restructuring all of it to fit the new template’s layout and content model.

The work was methodical: page by page, I migrated text, images, and metadata from the old system into the new CMS structure. Each research project needed its description reformatted, its images re-uploaded at the correct dimensions, and its metadata (authors, dates, tags) properly categorized within OpenCMS’s content types.

Learning German through research

What made this project personally special was the unexpected language immersion. Many of the ICD’s project descriptions, press releases, and administrative pages existed in German. As a Brazilian who had just arrived in Germany for my master’s program, I found myself translating and adapting German text on a daily basis, not from a textbook, but from real research documentation about timber construction, robotic fabrication, and biomimetic structures.

Learnings

This project might seem modest compared to robotic fabrication or computational form-finding, but it taught me something valuable: the importance of how research is communicated. The most groundbreaking pavilion or the most innovative fabrication method means little if it cannot be found, understood, and referenced by others. Good content management is the infrastructure that makes knowledge accessible.

It was also my first professional experience working within a CMS, a skill that would later prove foundational when I built the BuildSystems website with Astro and the Notion API, and eventually this very portfolio site.