We didn’t blot any updates for a while, but it doesn’t mean we were lazy – in fact, we had double # of meetings/working times while we were not blogging!

2 weeks ago, CURE was one of the presenters in the class – and we spent a good amount of time preparing for the class activity. First half was led by Galen and Josh from CURE – they gave us talks about their work, their experiences and the advocacy. The second half was led by Susanna and me – more specifically about the project. Class (and participants on Hangout) was divided into 3 groups, brainstorming new ideas for our project. Each group had a theme of different platforms; map, game, or anything else.

Turned out pretty well, not because of the ideas but because of the discussion led from the exercise – that helped us a lot to define our project/product design requirements more in details.

Originally, we were considering three ideas:

1. Map that visualizes the data of residency restrictions , or other restrictions that registrants face in day-to-day life

2. Game that illustrates the difficulty that they face

3. Map that was tied with personal stories of registrants

We revisited these three ideas, and talked a lot about what should be our main focus, and redefined that our product should convey the argument of why the registry should be eliminated, through narrative personal stories and through statistics (quantitative evidence) – while keeping the “map with dots” as a symbol because that’s what people are familiar with when they think of the registry, and that’s what we want to change their perspectives of.

We call this idea “Stories Behind The Map” – and we are now designing three different platforms of Storied Behind the Map

1. Website

• Users see the map with dots
• Each dot they roll over, they get either: a personal story, or, a quote, or, a key fact (w/link to source/study) debunking the arguments for the registry.
•  Assuming each user will only click on x dots, show them only stories and facts they haven’t yet seen. (so that we can convey our argument in the most convincing way)

2. Mobile App

• General feature is same as Website, but additional features unique to the phone app.
• History View and List of Actions to Take
• Latest News Notification

3. Infographics

• This would be one file, conveying the same contents as website (but smaller amount, of course), that can be printed, shared on GOOD.is, Buzzfeed, Twitter and other media easily

We will reveal our progress in the presentation on Wednesday, so stay tuned! Here’s a small peak of it …