My Framer Site

Information Architecture I

Ethan Flematti

Me, You, and Everyone
We Know at MassArt

Exploring the demographics and personalities of MassArt students through various approaches to data collection and visualization.

With hundreds of unique entries responding to 21 selected questions, a series of engaging (and often humorous) expressions came to fruition.

Put your data caps on and let's dive in.

Week One

Data Collection

MYE Spreadsheet

As a group, we selected 21 questions that we wanted to ask the student body at MassArt. The basis of these questions varied from demographics, personality, to humor and pop culture.

When all data was collected, we split off individually to sort and clean the data as we saw fit, and in ways that would best serve our purposes in data visualization.

Week Two

Bird's Eye View

WHO LOVES THEIR DADDY?

To take a "Bird's Eye View" on a set of data is to look at it from a broader perspective in order to find an outstanding story. I found a story in this question from the survey: "Who was the last person you said 'I love you' to?"

Putting a spotlight on this question, I narrowed down the information to an even more niche contrast—the quantity of people that last said "I love you" to their dad over their mom. I explored how this related to a handful of the other questions that were asked.

Considering that fathers received much less of a response to the mothers after reviewing the data, the idea for "WHO LOVES THEIR DADDY?" sprung.

Week Three

Sequence

WHO LOVES THEIR DADDY? – Sequential

A sequence is when a narrative is told piece by piece, and the viewer must navigate the entire story to gain the bigger picture.

I was not quite done with "WHO LOVES THEIR DADDY?" yet, therefore I decided to visualize my former poster in a hand-held way that a person could flip through.

I designed a flip-book-like set of slips of paper corresponding to the appropriate length with their respective percentage. This way, the user could use their hands to feel in order to visualize and understand the data.

Week Four

Interaction

UNCERTAINTY:
A Reflection of MassArt Student Confidence

Moving to a space of interaction, I sought to design a simple yet effective way to gauge a broad spectrum of people and perspectives.

Posters always call my name, so I thought to take a path that I was somewhat comfortable with while exploring this new idea that is foreign to me: having the audience draw and manipulate the poster, and decide with their own hand how the poster looks.

"UNCERTAINTY" is a poster that invites the viewer to draw a line that directly reflects their answers to a quick questionnaire. As more lines accumulate on this grid, it becomes clearer how the masses tend to answer the questions, and whether or not most of the people in the group are optimistic, pessimistic, or unsure about their own futures.

Weeks Five-Six

Final Study

UNCERTAINTY:
A Reflection of MassArt Communication Design Student Confidence

After testing the idea of interactive line graphing from the,
I wanted to hone in on the idea and streamline it while focusing
on students in the Communication Design program.

The complications that I noticed while testing was that people would often start their line on a dot that was not labeled as the starting point. There were also many occasions where individuals would repeatedly draw back-and-forth over their pathed line—something that I expected and even encouraged, but the sheer amount of it obscured a lot of valuable answers and ruined potential for more unique, interesting pathing visuals. Finally, there was some confusion about how to interact with the piece, specifically whether one was supposed to draw a line in one direction or another.

In my final two weeks of exploration, I constructed and designed an interactive board that solved many of these issues, and made for more efficient data collection, and an enhanced user experience.

The Revision Process

I saw the potential for a three-dimensional aspect of the poster after testing it with markers during the previous phase. I decided that string was a good candidate as a medium for this piece. For other materials, I obtained a large 24 by 48" plank of plywood as well as nails to retain the string paths.

To make this final rendition of the project a success, I prioritized addressing the design issues from my prototype that led to human error. I made a new poster that was oriented in a diagonal format. This allows people to move along the board from one point to another without needing to backtrack over their own line. Another notable change is that not only does the diagonal grid direct the user straight to the starting point, but I pre-tied the strings to there so there was nowhere for people to misplace the beginning of their input, and could start the experience immediately without the need to tie their own string.

The new version worked well, and required minimal tweaking from me to make the piece uniform in its appearance. The outcome is a graphical but tangible art piece that has visual interest, and a gauge on an important topic relating to student life.

Thank You.

MYE

Me, You, and Everyone We Know at MassArt