Reimagining a traditionally physical publication into an inclusive and personal digital experience.
Seattle-based non-profit Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) organizes to strengthen the global food sovereignty movement through education and mobilization. During my six month internship with CAGJ, I had the opportunity to introduce HCD methodology in a variety of projects and tasks. One of my primary deliverables involved developing and launching a digital zine experience for the organization’s latest publication "Recipes for a New Normal."
CAGJ has published two prior physical editions of Our Food, Our Right. This year, the organization sought to increase the project's accessibility by publishing an additional digital version available to the public. At the time that I joined the organization, the format of this virtual zine was being deliberated. Given my background in mobile and web prototyping, I pitched the idea of a website. This concept was well received as it posed a more engaging solution than a static PDF.
showcase food justice stories in an interactive, accessible, and intimate website that invites CAGJ’s community to explore the digital zine?
Prior to my involvement with the zine project, I worked alongside another intern to develop an Accessibility Guide for the organization. The attached guidelines summarize our research regarding: video and descriptive captioning, alternative text, visual imagery, and resources to streamline accessible creation. We also spoke with and centered the perspective of a disabled organizer who lent their time and energy towards voicing their lived experience to ensure CAGJ implemented best practices for the zine project.
Holistically, this document details research, resources, and personal anecdotes regarding accessible design practices in order to enable CAGJ to create more inclusive content. It served as a foundation for our digital zine.
Given the demanding nature of non-profit work, our efforts were dedicated towards the final steps in the HCD cycle. We did not have the resources to over-invest in researching and ideating, so this project primarily showcases the Prototyping step.
Interactive
Leveraging user needs, organization needs, and visual appeal.
Intimate
Facilitating intimate connections between users and the zine content.
Accessible
Ensuring accessibility for visually impaired and deaf users at every facet of the design.
A high-level instance that my design team had to deliberate was how the digital zine would either reflect or deviate from the user flow of its physical counterpart.
With a tangible publication, readers intermittently flip through each piece in an order that feels deliberate and intentional. For a website, we needed to consider factors like retention rate and scroll fatigue which would inform users interaction with the content. To promote sustained engagement, we ultimately chose to identify each piece as one of three categories: art, story, or recipe. This way, our content was split into separate tables of contents with ~12 works/ section.
The benefits of this decision include:
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to offer a unique experience for users engaging with the zine online
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of a single table of contents listing all 40 pieces
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of pieces imposed by a vertical list
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on pieces that exists in a combination of these categories
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of the zine that is maintained in the print version
The challenges with this decision involve:
Future considerations to address the consequences of this decision would involve consulting artists as we determine which category each piece fits into and offering an additional experience with the table of contents from the print version.
Ultimately, the decision to embrace our digital medium enabled us to explore ingenuity in the way that the content was presented. One way this manifested was by prompting artists to provide audio recordings of their pieces in order to not only increase accessibility, but further promote a personal and intimate experience to engage readers.
The website for CAGJ’s third edition of Our Food, Our Rights: Recipes for a New Normal was launched over the summer of 2021. Over 30 contributors share art, stories and recipes from Punjab, Puerto Rico and Indigenous Alaska.
While I was given the opportunity to run point on this project and tasked with building out a majority of the site on WordPress, this site reflects the collective efforts of my team of four as we navigated a balance between organizational, user needs, and visual aesthetics. This project showcases my dedication to accessible design, HTML/ CSS capabilities, and experience building a project from ideation to launch. Next steps for iterating on this project would include:
(1) dedicating more time to the responsiveness of this site (2) ensuring the user experience is maintained on mobile (3) implementing a collective table of contents so that users can experience the digital zine in conjunction with the physical zine by listening to the audio as they read.
Exercising HCD for the first time in a real-world context through my work for a non-profit was a rewarding and challenging experience. On one hand, I was able to exercise autonomy over the direction, execution, and implementation of this project. On the other hand, it was difficult to seek out mentorship in a limited full-time staff with no former experience with human-centered design. I am proud of the principles that we prioritized in this project but given our limited timeframe. Most of all, I am joyful that my design skills are growing to an extent where I can reflect on this site and recognize areas for growth.
Contributing to the zine and watching it materialize as we worked was a deeply personal and meaningful opportunity. Prior to my professional involvement with CAGJ, I learned about the upcoming edition of this publication through outreach soliciting submissions. At the time, my family was incredibly invested in the ongoing 2020-2021 Indian Kisan Morcha or (Farmer’s Protest) advocating for farmers rights and food justice in India. As we were following this news, I learned about my father’s own stories as a farmer, and the deep history of farming for generations before me. I shared CAGJ’s call for artwork with my father, who submitted poetry inspired by the Kisan Morcha. The zine features this work alongside work from dozens, recounting their own food stories.
