Week 1
Week of Feb.1
We are an ETC team named ‘Archive Dive’ working on a client-based project for this semester. Our client, the HistoryMakers, has a digital archive of interviews with a broad range of African Americans that tells underrepresented stories from all walks of life. The digital archive can be found here.
During the first week of the semester, we emerged as a team of programmers, UX/UI designers, and artists. By learning each other’s strengths we decided every member’s roles and responsibilities. Scheduling our regular meetings with the team, faculty advisors, and clients, we prepared to work with the clients to learn of the problems our project aimed to solve.
After our first meeting with the client, we learned more about their expectations from this project. They wanted an interactive web experience that used content from the digital archive and would attract younger Americans, as well as an international audience, motivating them to use the archive. Our next step was to understand the existing archive that consists of a tens of thousands of interviews from over 3,000 people. We discussed ways we could interpret the data to make it be more relatable to the youngsters. Exploring different categories for data like stories, emotions, favorite color, favorite food, music, and more, we brainstormed their visual depictions on various platforms. As this week ends our focus shifts toward user research, while we continue to develop ideas to pitch to the client.