WE THE ECONOMY We the Economy APP
We the Economy is a website that collaborates 20 short films related to every aspect our economy. The point here is not their content. The whole idea of its website design, and their mobile App is what I think we can learn and apply to our spring project.
As we already know, our project is about the environment (by far), and I remember all of us were hooked by the interactive map that we saw in class, and we are all thinking about how we are going to present our project. I’m totally down for building a website that has all the information we want to share with the public, because it’s easy for everybody to get access to, and we can make interaction with them remotely.
Back to their website, when you first enter their homepage, you’re welcomed by a semi-full-screen video clip that might already blow your mind, so, you want to see more, right? Then when you click “films” button, it leads you to all the 20 short films they made, sectioned by chapters like “what is the economy?” “what is money?” and “what causes inequality?” Each chapter includes films with hover over descriptions that make it easier for you to choose the one you concern the most about. In their “education” section, different than the traditional white background and black font color, they use color blocks to simplify the page, so that we don’t have to look for what we want, it’s highlighted right there without any mouse scrolling.
Other than having the audience just watch the film as another story, the team created a quiz section and interactive map section on the same page when you click the movie. So that would make the audience pay more attention when they watch the film and actually think about the question afterward.
We don’t necessarily have to be this fancy, but I think a website like this would help us reaching out to more audience and make them care. As we are going to learn Esri next semester, making an interactive map is not going to be a problem, and a website is the best way to collaborate all the information and stories in different forms in on place.
Another example I found is the Chaing the Food Chain website, http://changingthefoodchain.org/ this is the website/map that the Hand that Feeds team created alongside their project, (that’s the video I showed to class about minimum wage and illegal immigrants) Instead of embedding maps to website, they made their website into an actual map. With different filters on the left side, audience and choose to see what they like, or zoom out to see everything in the entire Ameirca.