WEB | DESIGN | CODE
Visualizing Agism is two complimentary projects that seek to take a somewhat dry topic to many, aging, and use methods of visual communication that makes the information more interactive and digestible, with the goal of garnering an empathetic response from users, leading to increased engagement.
Given my background in aging policy and community planning, I was interested in exploring new methods of visually communicating the challenges of older adults creating a sense of empathy and engagement from users. I would like to expand this idea for other community and socially derived issues that have trouble communicating their messages and needs.
The question I seek to answer with this project is how can we use low-cost and no-cost technologies to better communicate current social and economic policy issues in new ways.
VISUALIZING AGISM INTERACTIVE WEBSITE
One part of Visualizing Agism is a web technology that harnesses narrative visualization to explain what agism is, what effects it has, and how to take action. It uses graphics, language & interactivity to boost user engagement.
VISUALIZING AGISM THROUGH TWITTER
Visualizing Agism through Twitter is a companion project to the website that could be integrated into the site in the future.
The goal of this short program written using Processing and the Twitter API is to scrape twitter for #agist and #ageist tweets, and communicate them visually to the user to help them draw new conclusions about how and where agism and agist remarks are prevalent. This program serves as a litmus test for cultural attitudes around aging and older people, sampling how people feel about agism across the world.
This project was created for the combined Web/Code/Design final project for my MFA Design + Technology intensive summer bootcamp.
Dana Martens 