My final project focuses on how the need of humans to separate wildlife from civilization has lead to loss of land and loss of life. This need has caused not only the extinction of various plants and animals but has also made it difficult to protect the existing biodiversity.
In this part of the project, I will provide an overview of all my work in the previous project submissions and provide a summary of how I navigated through various steps to build the story: “Humanity’s Destruction of Wildlife”
In Part I of the project, I was very focused on building a narrative centered around wildlife that had a strong story arc and enough publicly available data that could support everything I wanted to explore as a story-teller. I started off with the technique of mindmapping where I first listed out all of the important aspects of wildlife (Both, plants and animals) followed by designing a story arc which covered all those details which I believed were essential to building a hook and a strong call to action.
Once I had all the particulars in palce, I went ahead with designing visualizations either by hand or on figma which could serve as initial representatives of the story being expressed through data. The development of these sketches also helped me gauge the readability of each of these visuals and formed a baseline upon which I could improve in the next part of the project.
Before starting part II of the project, I made a decision to use Shorthand for storyboarding. The reason behind my decision was that I wanted to use the same medium for the user research interviews as well as for the final deliverable so that the findings of the user research are more specific and actionable.
After this, I defined the audience for the project, established the approach to identifying representative individuals to interview and designed the interview questions. Once this user research protocol was in place, I shortlisted the interviewees so that they closely resemble the intended audience. After conducting the interviews and gathering all the findings, I made decisions on all the changes that were required to be implemented in part III.
The user research formed the basis of all the changes that were implemented in part III. They are categorized into three main buckets: Content Changes, Changes to Visualizations and Changes to Images
My final project website can be viewed at Humanity’s Destruction of Wildlife. This is the final website that I was able to build after making required changes to my storyline that was defined in part I and incorporating feedback from user interviews that were conducted in part II.
In part II of the project, I defined the target audience as anyone who hopes to be part of a positive change in the environment. I aimed the project at individuals across the globe so that the learnings from the projects can bring them together to help conserve the natural world. I went further and reduced the scope the audience to those individuals who are recent graduates, current students in a field of environmental students or those individuals who have worked or are currently working with any environment/ wildlife focused organization.
However, in hindsight, after reflecting on the feedback from the user research, I realised that my audience pool should be individuals in various local communities. This is because I aim to provide enough information and resources so that individuals can be mobilized to take initiatives to conserve wildlife starting in their immediate surroundings.
In the first part, I talk about famous consevationists. This is because I wanted to show how ordinary people can make a global impact with careful thought, the right approach and impactful actions.
However, this was not included in my final deliverable. This is because it started building a sub-plot in the storyline which was highlighting the impact of humans as opposed to the negative effects on wildlife. Going ahead, this project can be further developed on the path of conservationists to map out their steps so that individuals can learn more about how they can be a part of a global movement.
The following were the primary data sources that were finalized in part I of the project:
The following are sources of key information used in this project
All the images used on shorthand were obtained from Unsplash and Pexels.