The phrase ‘Design for democracy’ is now thoroughly part of the design rhetoric, with eponymous courses at design schools and AIGA programmes. What does this mean? In the context of the Field Guides, design for democracy is design which supports the democratic process. Design which tries to ensure that people vote the way they want to. This also translates as design which understands the audience, understands the problem and designs for both. The unique thing about Field Guides is that they use design to facilitate better design. Here’s why:

In the 2000 presidential election in the USA the design of one ballot paper in Florida was so problematic that it resulted in not only hundreds of unintended votes, but ultimately lawsuits and harsh critique aimed at the election official that designed the ballot paper. In the context of design part of what’s troubling about this incident is that the official has gone on record to say that the confusing design was actually the result of her attempt to make ballots easier to read. Her good intentions however resulted in the punch hole for Al Gore becoming confused with that of the Reform party candidate on the opposite page.

Image from American History..

This incident, it’s been said, stimulated ernest discourse around improving ballot design but after two more elections a dramatic shift had not taken place. In mid-2007 design guidelines were put in place, with contributions from AIGA’s Design for Democracy project and published in a thorough U.S. Election Assistance Commission report.

It is from this context that the Field Guides emerged as a considered effort to further improve the situation.

The guides acknowledge the reality of who is often designing communication materials around election — non designers, not necessarily well versed in design theory. It also recognised that communication with voters is one part of a much larger, busier and complex schedule around election time and that anything which would move election officials to act would have to compete with a number of other concerns for their attention.

With this in mind the guides are based on in depth and informed research but have distilled this into a manageable format that would feel relevant and feasible to the people who would ultimately put the guidelines into practice.

The guides practice what they preach, with a functional, not overly designed aesthetic. The structure is clear — examples on the left, guideline on the right, things to avoid in grey, things to do in black and illustrations where needed used to illustrate a point.

The small, compact format with detailing like the round corners helps the guides feel unintimidating and manageable. While the confident, authoritative voice and straightforward language belies the research that is the foundation of these humble looking booklets.

Ultimately the greatest value of these guides is the advice they give and the better design they inspire. The best way to get a sense of this is to read them. All eight guides can be found on their website and through the links below:

Vol. 01. Designing usable ballots (PDF) (original research)
Vol. 02. Writing instructions voters understand (PDF) (original NIST report)
Vol. 03. Testing ballots for usability (PDF) (link to LEO kit at UPA)
Vol. 04. Effective poll worker materials (PDF) (original NIST report)
Vol. 05. Choosing how to communicate with voters (PDF)
Vol. 06. Designing voter education booklets and flyers (PDF)
Vol. 07. Designing election department websites (PDF)
Vol. 08. Guiding voters through the polling place (PDF)

All images, except original ballot card, courtesy Oxide Design Co..

The Refugee Project is a self-initiated effort by New York based Social Impact Design agency Hyperakt and Artist and Designer Ekene Ijeoma to make this valuable information easy to understand and simple to navigate. The interactive map tracks almost all significant migrations of displaced people in the last forty years, enabling a narrative, geographical, and temporal understanding of the crises.

The primary interface is constructed of three key elements: A timeline grouping crises by year, a heat map of refugee numbers overlaid onto a world map, and a headline highlighting key world events that year that contributed to or impacted a refugee crisis. These three components come together to create a sort of ‘dashboard’ overview of refugee crises, allowing you to grasp the scale and context of a crisis (in brief) quickly, while making it easy to drill deeper to find specific information.

Selecting a year populates the world map with a heat map overlay of circles of varying radii depicting the number of refugees originating from that country, while an information console on the side-bar lists figures and additional contextual information. The accompanying headlines and crises summaries, original content created for the site, echo the simple yet deep ethos of the rest of the tool.

Clicking anywhere on the map brings up information specific to that region, with lines radiating outward connecting it with the nations providing asylum to the affected people.

The interface on mobile devices is pared down even further, displaying the three countries with the highest number of refugees for any year, as well as the top three countries providing asylum, accompanied by links to more information.

The project has been received with near unanimous praise, with recognition from the New York MOMA, Design Museum London, and more, as well as worldwide press coverage and approval from organisations such as Amnesty International, the UNHCR, Oxfam International, and Human Rights Watch.

Making things visible is making things actionable.
The Refugee Project’s simplicity is its greatest victory. By giving visual form to such a large dataset, the tool enables even laypeople to make meaning of complex information, and enables insights that would otherwise have been apparent only to statisticians and academics. For instance, in light of the ongoing rhetoric surrounding the refugee crisis in Syria, I was surprised to see that the trend of refugees moving from developing to developed nations is, in fact, going the other way: some 85%+ of refugees from the developing world today find refuge in neighbouring countries, as opposed to a decade year ago, when the number was nearer 70%.

The project has even inspired others to create inspirational and interpretive works of their own, one great example being programmer and artist Brian Foo’s “Distance from Home” project, that uses algorithms to generate musical notes from the UNHCR data.

For more reading on the project, as well as works inspired by it, see:
Hyperakt case study
Design & Violence: MOMA
Design for Conflict Heritage