To go back to Part 1 of my project, the initial planning stage, please click this link here.
To go back to Part 2 of my project, the storyboarding phase, please click this link here.
To access my final website, please click here.
In reflecting on my final project, I think that my message is probably most relevant to individuals who attended universities whose endowments are greater than the national average. This is because universities that are historically under-funded may be less likely to have the capacity to divest from fossil fuels without harming their bottom line. Furthermore, in my initial articulation of my audience, I did not specify that I was primarily interested in reaching American university graduates. This specification is important because the funding systems for international universities are typically different and therefore I’m not sure how relevant university endowments are for non-American university graduates. Based on these factors, my key audience was American college grads, particularly those who went universities whose endowments are in the top 25 nationally.
This audience orientation informed my decisions about my “hook” for my presentation and my call to action. Specifically, American college graduates are likely to have had the experience of receiving calls to donate money to their alma maters and, for my call to action, the fossil fuel divesment campaign information includes information mostly about American colleges and universities. Additionally, I tried to narrow my focus in my call to action to something that individual people could do to make a change, rather than suggesting systemic change like a Congressionally-backed tax on university endowments.
The key changes that I made from Part 2 to Part 3 of my project were the following:
In reference to my first key change, I had initially decided to use a bolded, red color for the critical points that I wanted to highlight in my story. However, after consultation with my user research subjects, the majority of them noted that the red color was hard to read. This informed my decision to use a dull orange color instead of a red color to emphasize points throughout my presentation. This added a layer of visual consistency throughout my presentation and added a consistent marker to follow as users work through my website. Furthermore, I also used color differences to make a more distinct break between the headers on my website and the text-heavy sections of my presentation. I made all of my headers consist of white writing on a blue background for logical consistency and made the text-heavy sections gray with black text on top.
In crafting my final presentation, the part that was the hardest was addressing the “so what” portion of my topic. It’s one thing to highlight that university endowments, particularly those of the 25 top-ranked universities in the United States, are astronmically high but it is harder to communicate effectively why this matters to the average person. My initial plan prior to part 3 was to focus on how large university endowments have a direct impact on the communities in which they reside by looking at university endowments relative to the median income of the zip codes in which the universities reside. However, when I started to create my visualizations for part 2 of my project, I realized that I wasn’t able to tell the story that I wanted to tell because the median incomes were typically fairly high in the university zip codes. Through my user research, one of my interviwees made a good point that, historically, university endowment sizes had been critiqued in terms of what they are invested in. This interviewee provided fossil fuel and apartheid-related divestment campaigns as examples of this existing work. This then prompted me to switch my “so what” portion of my project to focus on fossil fuel divestment instead of the area median income.
In reference to my third key change, because I was unsure of what my “so what” should be in part 2, I also had an unclear sense of what individuals should do after seeing my presentation. After clarifying my “so what”, as mentioned above, I was able to find some links to direct resources that individuals could visit to get involved in divestment campaigns and to get detailed strategies for how to go through the investigative journalism process themselves to unconver insights about their alma mater’s endowment.
In reference to my fourth key change, I initially was comparing about 20 university endowments to the size of Rwanda’s GDP. Through user research and personal reflection, I realized that using Rwanda’s GDP as a reference point was fairly random as a starting point to contextualize just how large university endowments are. I took some advice from one my user research interviewees and firstly, reduced the countries I chose to analyze to the top 3 university endowments and then compared these endowments to several countries. I also highlighted the population of these countries relative to the student bodies that were at each of the sample universities. I think I was able to get my main comparison point across more clearly through the final infographic style I chose in this second iteration of my website.
Finally, in reference to my fifth key change, I intially only had my visualizations to communicate the story that I was trying to tell. During one of our class critique sessions, a group member of mine mentioned that it would be helpful to write some brief text to lead the reader so that I could ensure that readers were getting the key points that they were supposed to get from my visualizations directly, rather than having to infer the main point. Adding leading text also helped me to prevent or limit multiple interpretations from coming from my graphs and allowed the readers to see the “right” interpretation that I was hoping would come across.
After giving my presentation in class, I made the small change of adding coloring to the title of my bar chart and the grid chart of line graphs to make it clearer what the colors in the bars referred to, as this was a question I got both in user research portion of Part 2 and during my presentation. This was something that I was initially unsure of how to do in Flourish but later discovered how to do it after doing some searching for HTML tutorials. I hope that it is clearer now for the user. Also, one critique I got is that some individuals may not know the different between public and private universities, but given that my assumed audience is American college graduates, my assumption is that those who went through the American college admissions process would understand this common distinction.
Overall, this whole design process made me realize how important honest, specific feedback can be for the completion of a successful design project. It also highlighted how data can often be a limiting factor in getting across the information that you want to. If there were more robust data sources on university investments, I think my presentation could have been made richer, specifically in the “why does this matter section”. If I had more time, this is the part I would want to do a deeper dive on and create a robust database of university investment information for future researchers to use.
Note: The images used in my final project were either pictures that I personally took or from WikiMedia or Pexels