{"id":16198,"date":"2019-07-31T18:51:54","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T22:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=16198"},"modified":"2019-07-31T22:46:28","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T02:46:28","slug":"mapping-social-impact-design-corps-2005-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/visualization\/mapping-social-impact-design-corps-2005-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Social Impact: Design Corps 2005-2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The heart of Design Corps: clients, students and faculty around a table<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Charting a Course<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Some years ago, a recent Pratt graduate named Chris Peck went on a job interview. While his interviewer was taking Chris through a tour of the firm, they came upon some of the firm\u2019s work for Pencils of Promise<\/a>, a non-profit founded in 2008 that builds schools in developing regions. Recognition flashed across Chris\u2019 face. Gesturing toward the work, he said \u201cThat\u2019s funny! I worked on that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah. Apparently a lot of instructors use this identity for projects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo,\u201d Chris said pointing directly at the page. \u201cI designed that logo. In a class.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The logo he designed had traveled around the world and come back to meet him back at this interview in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The course that Chris was talking about is Design Corps, an Undergraduate Communications Design course at Pratt Institute revived in 2005 by then-department Chair Kathleen Creighton. Re-envisioned as a more direct interaction between students and pro-bono clients, Design Corps was intended to simulate as closely as possible a design firm experience that produced actual work for clients in need and taught students the benefits of giving back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it has gained some name recognition at the Institute level and beyond the gates, the course has generally gained a reputation as a small class that works with small non-profits \u2014 a \u2018good thing\u2019 that faculty, students or administrators have heard of but can\u2019t quite define. However, over its 14 years of existence in this form, Design Corps has evolved in the kind of work it does and how it does that work, with more emphasis on research and even more in-depth interaction with clients. It has also continued to expand its reach, working with clients whose impact is felt as far away as Laos \u2014 and of course having a lasting impact (so we hope) on students who have enrolled as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Professor David Frisco and I, the instructors of Design Corps for the last 14 years, have endeavored (with the help of the Pratt Institute Faculty Development Fund<\/a> [FDF]) to document and present the work of Design Corps over those 14 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will include an artifact, an exhibit and an updated web site, each of which would feature student work and case studies from the 14 years. An integral part of each would be a map of the clients with whom Design Corps has worked over the years, showing their scope in terms of both services delivered and geography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that in mind, the goal of this final project was to create an initial visualization that would map that scope and impact and explore methods for presenting it. By having the mapping done by one of the instructors, who was intimately involved with all aspects of the course\u2019s development, it would provide insight into benefits and challenges of different details and then allow for outside perspective through the UX research stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018end result\u2019 then, would be a prototype and an investigation, a jumping off point for either visualization by others or refinement on my part. In a sense, it would be a visualization of what Chris experienced in that interview years ago. (You\u2019ll see both Chris and Pencils of Promise if you move the slider to \u201cFall 09 – Spring 10\u201d in the dashboard.) As a tool, it would be part of a larger effort to educate internal and external audiences to the good work the course and its students have done<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PROCESS AND RATIONALE<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For a good deal of the project, the content and visualization fed each other, with discoveries in one opening possibilities in the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE CONTENT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focused on the projects defined in the FDF application \u2014 as well as our own interest in creating a database and documentation regardless \u2014 David and I had worked with graduate research assistants to develop content over the Fall 18 \/ Spring 19 academic year. Categories were proposed, student names compiled and contact information compiled into a set of Google sheets, one for clients and projects, and one for students. Of course, these sheets were incomplete and more visualizations themselves; tables for our review instead of clean, workable data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Where the data started<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So the sheets were cleaned up and missing content was gathered as an initial step in the process, with decisions made along the way as to categorization and structure. Open Refine<\/a> was used for some data cleanup and concatenation or separation where necessary. Other data, such as student names, were reviewed individually as a means of reviewing the original entry by student workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I created separate sheets for client location and client area of impact with a third sheet for student names. Discreet IDs (e.g. \u201cSJ_FA05\u201d to denote client and semester) were generated to link the first two sheets, while the student list was linked to these using a shared \u2018Year\u2019 field (e.g. \u201cFall 05 – Spring 06\u201d), which would come in handy when it came to interactive filtering on the dashboard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A cleaner (if still not perfect) sheet for client location and categories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

All three of these sheets were then linked through Tableau Public<\/a> as live documents, so that future realizations or the addition of future semesters could easily update in the visualization. Tableau was of course selected for the project due to its ability to show not just the locations of Design Corps\u2019 clients, but to link these to other statistical and text-based visualizations in a single dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE VISUALIZATION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast to how I had worked for most of the labs this semester, I started this time with several pen sketches to start organizing the content and thinking through the story I was telling, with a focus on location of the clients (geographic points), regions of their impact (shaded countries) and number of clients per kind of service (e.g. Community, Education) and project format (e.g. print, web). The last one was dropped pretty quickly in the visualization process, as I realized that any change was minimal, would be unclear due to overlap of those formats for a single project, and in the context of a site or exhibit would be a story told through other means. A later attempt to bring in a line graph of number of students through the years was similarly dropped, as it brought little to the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n