Duration
February - April 2018
Team
Willy Phantharangsy, Kayla Bajnauth, Henry Djorgee
Tools Used
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premier, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Arduino
Role
Concept & Research, Visual Design, Physical Computing
According to Statistics Canada, victims of sexual violence aren't contacting the police. More than 8 in 10 incidents weren't reported in 2011 - a number that has hardly changed since 2004. Women know their sexual attacker in three-quarters of incidents.
Reporting to the police can be a traumatic experience and a route that not all women want to take. Instead, we focus on encouraging women to use #MeToo and leverage the court of public opinion to seek justice.
#MeToo provides a voice for those who were afraid or ashamed and encourages victims to speak up, know they're not alone, and they can overcome their obstacles. It's important to know that justice takes on different forms, and our intentions were to deliver that message through our posters.
There are 2 parts to the #MeToo campaign that target 2 different audiences: the website (software) and the posters (physical computing & augmented reality).
The posters focus on empowering women. No matter what someone's body type, religion or race is, there are numerous communities ready to lend their support. Sharing even one story can inspire others to take action. Our 2 posters focus on appealing to the audience's rational and emotional side to encourage more reporting on sexual violence.
Our website encourages neutral bystanders to be more comfortable and educate them on how to react to the stories of people who talk about sexual violence.
When researching the victim stance, we first took a look at the statistics and current state on rape culture, sexual violence, and reporting sexual assault. From there, we worked iteratively on refining our message through multiple critique sessions until we were able to phrase our message in a way that encouraged action on the users' end. We knew we needed to aggregate a lot of background research on this topic in order to be able to handle any critiques of our stance and avoid committing logical fallacies.
According to our research, social media is a popular way to report sexual assault.
Twitter confirmed to CBS News that over 1.7 million tweets included the hashtag "#MeToo," with 85 countries that had at least 1000 #MeToo Tweets.
Facebook released statistics showing that there were more than 12 million posts, comments and reactions regarding "Me Too" in less than 24 hours, by 4.7 million users around the world.
Following our research on social media, we conducted more research on statistics and compiled a research report containing figures from Statistics Canada about sexual assault. Below are some notable highlights from the report.
According to the government of Canada, statistics indicate that 39% of women report having experienced at least one incidence of sexual assault since the age of 16.
According to the General Social Survey on Canadians' Safety, this represents approximately 636,000 self-reported incidents of sexual assault.
Afterwards, we conducted user interviews with millennials in order to gauge their opinion and stance on the issue. Using this information, we created personas for the following next steps.
Following our research phase, we brainstormed different ways that we could position our message in a way that would be effective and appeal to our target audience. We needed to balance our message so it didn't come off as too aggressive, threatening, preach-y, or big brother-y.
Afterwards, we mapped out the common narrative on both sides who were directly affected by it (women as the victims and men as the perpetrators).
By taking these points, we crafted a direction we wanted to go towards for the final product.
For our visual design, we took inspiration from the original #metoo website, but adjusted it as well. We also looked at different inspiration of social justice advertisements in order to get a clear understanding of how we should position our product.
Shown below is the final product from the AR Posters.
The final logos concept takes numbers from high-profile people in the world, namely celebrities, politicians, and influencers, and shows that victims should be unafraid and take to reporting on social media to take action against sexual assault offenders. It also spreads the message that "not serious enough" doesn't matter - if it happened and you didn't feel okay, it's not okay.
The final pathos concept pulls on the themes of unity and strength in numbers, showcasing diversity among the final design. When the user scans the AR marker, a video plays showing how impactful the #MeToo movement is, encouraging the viewer to report sexual violence if they are a victim.
After creating the poster, we also designed a website in order to persuade neutral bystanders to support sexual assault victims. Based on our user interviews, we created 4 personas that reflected 4 types of bystanders we recognized: neutral skeptic (Oliver), neutral naive (Alex), neutral bystander (Karl), and neutral victim (Lilo).
These were the most common personality types that we encountered throughout our user interviews that we conducted earlier and we wanted to encourage these personas to feel more comfortable with speaking about sexual assault.
The below advertisements were designed for the neutral skeptic persona.
After creating the poster, we also designed a website in order to persuade neutral bystanders to support sexual assault victims. This website contains our entire case study for #metoo and is not intended for audiences, but as a pitch to a digital marketing agency for a direction proposal. It contains information such as the issue we were trying to tackle, our personas, approach and the final campaign.
Through this process, I learned that it takes a lot of skill and research in order to convey a message that appeals to your target audience. I really enjoyed this project because it allowed me to learn how to use AR technologies, as well as exercise my visual design & video editing skills. This type of campaign takes a really long time to create because it contains very sensitive information, and it was a very interesting process in how you distill that information and transform it into something actionable.
Looking for a designer who is a user champion? An experimenter who frets over the tiniest details? A foodie who is willing to venture anywhere for the next best instagrammable thing? A team player who loves friendly competition and is always up for a challenge?
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