With the interactive project, I chose to continue with my broad theme of environmental studies. Unlike the photo editing and illustrator project where I focused on (micro)plastic in the ocean, in this project, I focused on the contemporary worldwide environmental movement. My goal for this project was to captivate people to care about the environment by showing the intersectionality of the subject. I was trying to communicate that wherever you are you can get involved and you can learn about local environmental history. I was also trying to communicate that although we have come a long way and made a lot of progress, we still have a long way to go. I would suggest that my audience is anyone interested and curious about the environment. Ideally, this would spark interest in middle school students to high school students who have a partial background. I tried to incorporate a wide range of topics and use lots of visuals so as to not constrain anyone from enjoying this story map.
Some of the features of the project that effectively convey the message to my audience include background, marker, image, title, caption, and location options. For the background, I chose a green color to correlate with the concept of “green parties”, nature, and “green new deal.” By choosing this background I felt that it would tie in with most of the concepts. For the marker, I chose a small seedling to represent a newfound curiosity and something waiting to blossom. This marker was also important because it symbolized nature all over the map. In terms of the images I chose, I tried to advertise people, programs, court cases, and many other topics in a straightforward way. Hopefully at least one of the many images is appealing in one way or another to the viewer. My thought process for choosing titles was very similar to choosing images; I wanted the title to grab the attention of the viewer. Additionally, I wanted them to not feel inclined to read a very long caption if they were not interested in the title or image but if either was captivating I made a short caption that would educate and inspire the viewer to do their own research. Lastly, the locations I chose effectively convey the part of my message that nature and environmentalism is everywhere.
To create this project I conducted a series of steps. First, I researched and synthesized my own knowledge in brainstorming about the most important pieces, events, and people of the contemporary environmental movement. From this massive amount of ideas, I had to choose the most important and varied. Next, I started the story map by assigning each one of these important contemporary environmental images, title, and caption. Then, I edited smaller details like background, marker, and map options. After 21 slides and a title slide, I was happy with how the map looked. Finally, I edited everything as needed and tried to add image credit since there was already a specific field for it.
From this project, I learned a lot about communication, specifically its difficulty. The first two projects felt simple to make applicable to everyone because it was very visual-based. Whereas in this interactive project it was difficult for me to make it understandable for young children because of the writing component. I did try to use lots of pictures but ultimately I decided after the peer review that elementary school children were not my target for this project. Assuming that someone has an understanding of maps and at least a little bit of background in environmental studies forced me to narrow down my audience. I also learned a lot about the power of logos, familiar faces, and symbols; being able to add these helped convey the message more easily. Although it was my first time learning to use a story map it was fairly easy and I had a good time.