The Other Side of the Road
A book about seeing racism – a project for my Ethics of a Designer in a Global Economy class and the Racism Untaught project by Lisa Mercer.
About the project
A lot of research went into our projects. Our team did research surrounding the lasting impacts of segregation, inspired by roadblocks in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
I did a case study of Detroit, Seattle, Minneapolis, Richmond, and Chicago to investigate how these systems of segregation were established, how they are enforced, and what has been done to address them. I also researched group threat theory, based on the paper “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position” by Herbert Blumer.
My final project was informed by both my own and my team’s research, and had a goal of creating an interactive and accessible narrative about how systems of segregation still affect people’s everyday lives, and provide a starting point to change.
Special thanks to this group for brainstorming the design for our process book, and to Mason Rousey for picking colors, fonts, and textures.
Literature Review
Learn more about Shaker heights, and how segregation lasts into today because of physical barriers in our communities.
Written by Kaiya Scholl, Denise Carmona, Celia Cousineau, Mason Rousey, and Hannah Miller. Designed by me.
My Research
I focused on how segregation was established, continued, and how it was addressed in five cities in the US. I also researched the concept of group threat theory.
Prototyping
I created paper prototypes to help me figure out how to create a hands-on, interactive reading experience that helped communicate my research.
My main obstacle was choosing how I wawnted to make my booklet interactive. Originally, the flaps would be turned over to the other side of the book, creating a different narrative based on the reader’s actions while reading the front of the book. While an interesting concept, it proved too difficult of a user experience.
Feedback from my classmates greatly helped during this process; including color coding the inner and outer pages to correlate with the stories, and making my own handwriting font.
