Information-centric networking has been attracting increasing attention within the networking community. Technological solutions as well as entire architectures have been proposed with subtle but seemingly important differences. In this article, we define a set of design tenets for an information-centric architecture together with a demonstration of its feasibility. For the latter, we present an early prototype of an artifact that is directly based on our design framework. This prototype is available under open source, deployed in a European-wide testbed, and can be used for Planetlab-scale experiments. Early indications of its performance show promising results for our future work.