DESIGN CHALLENGE
The TIME'S UP Foundation's Impact Lab worked with IDEO to envision and build a platform that enables policy makers and journalists to access, investigate, and learn from critical information related to women's challenges and use this data to fuel their work. Our focus:
How might we identify and utilize powerful, digestible, and actionable data-driven indicators to inform and influence the articulation of narratives in service of communicating intersectional issues impacting women?
CONCEPT & DATA STORYTELLING
We were tasked with finding an immersive way to showcase how the COVID-19 pandemic had disproportionately impacted women, in collaboration with CARES who supplied us with extensive datasets on how women had been affected with regards to mortality rates, loss of employment, decrease in pay, domestic violence, and many other parameters. Our intended audience was policymakers and journalists, and we wanted to highlight clearly and viscerally the voices behind the data and statistics.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
The concept we came up with ended up being a game-like web experience that drew upon a strong metaphor - the cards that you have been dealt in life, and the way that affects your path forward. We spoke with different women, and created a set of audio stories. The landing page highlighted how our current state of society and policy had been a house of cards, and used scroll animations to show the house of cards collapsing once the COVID pandemic hit.
For each story, we boiled down the characteristics of the woman to the five parameters that she had been dealt: identity and demographics, health and safety, dependents and caregiving, education and employment, and agency and power. The user would start the experience by being dealt a set of cards, which would highlight one of the windows of a particular woman’s home, and could shuffle to browse through them.
Clicking in to a window would zoom in to the interior of the woman’s environment - I worked with a talented illustrator to detail out an approximate representation of each woman’s story, replete with objects they had mentioned, or cues to other aspects of their life. Within this environment, the user would be able to hear audio clips and read through a particular woman’s experience, with the cards she had been dealt on display.
An example of the set of cards would be: Hispanic, Domestic Abuse, Self-employed, Sole caregiver for three children, Pursuing education. One of the cards would be glowing yellow, prompting the user to click that card and see it flip over - revealing how that aspect could be supported by policy change. In this example, “Sole caregiver for three children” could be flipped over to reveal “Universal childcare” - and detailed out examples of successful childcare policy in other parts of the world. Users could click through and be taken to a data dashboard that we designed, where they could use a sandbox of different datasets and see how different parameters would affect the economic growth and overall wellbeing of women in the US. What we most wanted to highlight with this was the invisible labor of women and how that would contribute to the economy when quantified.
MY ROLE: Concept, Narrative Design, Art Direction, Partnering with dev team on build, directing illustration and sound design, co-leading project, responsive visual design