The DAAO is a key provider of artists biographies that recently received a Discovery Grant to extend the reach of its scholarly outcomes. Laudanum has been working closely with Dr Gillian Fuller and her team for 5 months to design the rebuilding process. This involved producing a Business Analysis, Technical Specification, User experience plan, interface wireframes and design. Early in the piece we were contracted to produce a Business Analysis and pathway for the new DAAO with an eye on financial and data sustainability. We conducted a 360° review, cross referencing current use cases with academic research requirements and new methodologies. We also interviewed stakeholders and potential investors in academic, arts, business and government and worked through a web of licensing issues. From this we developed a number of models and pathways and graded each for  likelihood of outcome given different environmental factors. Our key argument remains that it is vital to maintain ground with this resource. There is no doubt that the reach of biography databases is much greater than imagined, and syndication multiplies the impact of what is essentially traded cultural capital. The DAAO therefore must remain current to be a viable source of data. Our research made it evident that a stakeholder "user pays" model for this dataset is inconceivable without synthetic intervention. So the key outcome of the DAAO is a push to upgrade the ongoing freshness of the data through collaboration with contributors. At this point we delivered the Business Analysis and we began the User Experience pass. We dialled up uber-UXer Lotte Meijer to collaborate, and set our top level goal to devise a way to encourage users to participate by contributing information about artists. Around the time of the first UX meeting, Mr. Snow and I went to a "happiness" lecture, and watched a Youtube video from The Fun Theory which is an initiative by Volksvagen. The premise is that you can change people's behaviour by making things more fun. So this idea infected our process and we've delivered a complete interface that uses various game and fun tactics to encourage continued relationships from data contributors. When it became evident that the brief required bringing Australia's design history into the fold, we ran a Design Workshop that invited participants to contribute and discuss issues of interaction and research requirements from a design perspective. We also used this opportunity to test some of the search tools and interfaces we had selected to use in the DAAO. We were very lucky that the DAAO team work so hard and are so great at logic problems! Gillian, Olivia Bolton and Jo Croucher were incredibly generous and giving in thinking and we had a lot of fun.  Each meeting ended in a big high as we worked through pumping out one creative solution after another. The Software Requirements Specification (Technical Specification) was written largely by us in consultation with Gillian and her team. It documents the end to end features of the site and, along with its reference documents, forms the master build document for the DAAO going forward. It is a living document in that it will continue to evolve as features are added and refined. Another key document that we produced was the UX wireframes for the site. They document features of each step of each user path through the site itemising each element and interaction of each page. Based on these we also produced a set of screen designs and style guide for the look and feel of the new DAAO. The SRS, Wireframes and Look & Feel are the documents from which the final site can be built. We are now very happy that the baton for the build has largely been passed onto The Interaction Consortium who are working with Gillian and the DAAO office.  We continue to work on various parts, including branding, front end templates and user experience (UX) testing. Go team ! We're all looking forward to August!