Fall 2022
Student project
DearDigitalEquity
Exploring and Understanding Digital Equity in Washington State
Background
When the pandemic hit, the digital divide became ever so clearer and couldn’t be avoided anymore. We noticed, however a lack of representation and knowledge of digital equity on online platforms.
Our mission for the Fall 2022 quarter in BIMD 351 (Interactive Media Design class at UW) was to create an informative website that raises awareness of the digital divide in Washington State called "Dear Digital Equity".
We aimed to unravel the realm of digital equity through a combination of blog posts, infographics, and in-depth profiles highlighting the endeavors of digital equity advocates who are based in Washington State.
Exploring the Problem
We started our project by looking at reference designs and websites that are already talking about digital equity. I started by googling the meaning of digital equity and comparing it to the term digital equality.
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We were then assigned different focus points and topics that included: aesthetics, competitors, content flow/ information architecture, content mediums, platform selection, and social media footprint, by our professors. I was assigned aesthetics and was tasked to look for reference images that could get us started on a project logo, icons, color palette, etc.
After I presented my findings to the class I joined the platform selection group. We had to choose the platform that we wanted to use to create the deardigitalequity.org website. The main platforms that we ended up looking at were Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. We explored the capabilities and features of those platforms and created a priority matrix that we would use to visualize the comparison. After multiple discussions within our group and the rest of our cohort, we decided to use Squarespace and connected the domain name to the website.
Project Scope
To scope the problem we met with our community advisors and stakeholders, Sabrina Roach, Principal at Make Digital Equity, and Nancy Chang, Director of Digital Navigation Services at Goodwill. We had prepared questions to ask them in our meeting to get a better understanding of the topic of digital equity. As they were answering the questions we took notes that later on served as a foundation for our knowledge on the topic.
Target Audience
Our target audience was advisors and practitioners in the field of digital equity. We wanted our website to serve as an information hub for people interested in the field as well as companies and practitioners who were interested in achieving digital equity in their workplace. To appeal to this target audience we used terms and slang that are used in this field. To become more knowledgeable of those terms we each watched a recording from the Digital Equity Learning Network of Seattle & King County or the Digital Equity Forum.
Deliverables
We we tasked with creating three deliverables over the course of three months. An infographic/explainer, a blog post, and a digital equity advocate profile.
1. Explainer
I initiated my research by delving into the intricate layers of the current digital equity landscape and unraveling the historic trajectory that has shaped its present state. I found myself reviewing rules and legislation that were implemented to advance digital equity within the state.
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Recognizing the need for clarity and visualization of the information I had gathered, I decided to create a digital equity timeline that would highlight important events that have led to the state of digital equity today.
I partnered up with Amanda Ong, a fellow student, to create this explainer. We met with Sabrina Roach who provided us with a list of events surrounding digital equity starting from 2013 up until 2022. We reorganized and summarized these events in our own words and designed a timeline using Figma. After multiple iterations, we came up with a final design that we thought was simple. Once it was ready Mark Chen, a part-time faculty member and co-facilitator of this project, helped upload the timeline to the website.
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View the full timeline here.
2. Advocate Profile
I was fortunate enough to be able to set up a meeting with Will Booth, the program manager at T3 (Tribal Technology Training) who works closely with tribal communities. Those communities sometimes lack access to and knowledge of digital devices, which makes digital equity a widely discussed topic in that environment. Will talked about his definition of digital equity, what motivates him about it, what his organization’s role is in moving towards digital equity, and more. Following our meeting, I organized his answers in a Google document to make it easier for Kim, the senior editor, and classmate, to upload the finished profile to the website.
View the full profile here.
3. Digital Equity as Design
After the first two deliverables were completed, I started working on the final deliverable, the Digital Equity as Design blog post. Something I noticed while working on this project was the amount of collaboration and teamwork that was put into it. While interviewing Will, I also noticed how a lot of the work he does, he doesn’t do alone, rather he does things in collaboration with other team members. I, therefore, decided to write about the connection between digital equity and collaboration in design and titled my blog post “Collaboration-One Team, One Goal”.
View the blog post here.
Outcomes
We now have a published website under the domain name deardigitalequity.org. It is populated with over 20 advocate profiles, explainers, stories, and blog posts. We also created accounts on various social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, to hopefully reach a larger audience and have more and more people talk about digital equity.
