Jim Crow Museum Achievers Animations: Fall 2020

Overview

The Achieving Despite Resistance animations are part of The Epic Project, which is committed to exploring, creating, and testing new concepts for educational and informational media aimed at increasing the engagement, retention, and understanding of knowledge.

The animations are built on the I-See-U Production Design Framework For Visual Media that supports and facilitates design citizenship. It is an acronym that means Inclusive, Socio-Emotional, Entertaining, and Universal.

Design Methods Attempted and Tested

Universal Design

  • Write the Script using a visual narrative format. This helps sight-impared viewers understand what is happening on screen visually.

  • Create a Dynamic Visual soundscape: This helps sight-impaired viewers personalize their vision for the events happening on screen.

  • Integrate Captions This helps hearing-impaired viewers read the captions and watch the animated action simultaneously.

  • Use a Limited Color Palette that works equally well for color-blind viewers, viewers with light sensitivity challenges, and full-color-sighted viewers

Socio-Emotional Design

  • Set Expectations and provide an intense emotional experience in the intro. This primal brain activation will influence the audience’s perception of the rest of the video.

  • Tell a Multimedia Story: This knowledgeable brain activation will inject the information into long-term memory through, image, sound, and motion association.

  • Offer a Value Proposition: This activates the viewers logical brain by providing them a choice.

  • Connect it With the Viewer: This activates the viewers tribal brain by connecting these past achievers with the society and culture we live in today.


The Audience

The audience consisted of

  • 28 of the college senior art and design students that worked on the animations

  • 3 KCAD Faculty

  • 8 KCAD Administrators

  • 8 JCM Staff Members

  • 4 Ferris Administrators

  • 2 Members of The Diatribe; A spoken word Poetry after school eduction program focused on mental health and inclusion



Process

  1. The review took place over Zoom video conferencing.

    • Audio compression lessens the effectiveness of the the sound design for all participants

    • Video playback can be a bit choppy for some participants

  2. An introduction to the project goals and methods were presented vis a slideshow

  3. Each animation was played

  4. A brief Survey was administered

The Slide Show

JimCrowMuseumAchievers


Survey Questions and Responses



Summary of Survey Results

The survey was broken into three parts:

  1. General universal design

  2. socio-emotional efficacy

  3. Retention of Information

Universal Design

  • It was difficult, to various degrees, for slightly over half of the viewers to read the text and watch the animated action simultaneously

  • The text itself was onscreen long enough for about 2/3 of viewers to read without difficulty

  • For about 2/3 of the viewers the sound design helped to set emotional tone and tell the story equally.

socio-emotional efficacy

  • The primary emotions felt were: Informed, Inspired, empowered, empathetic, and sympathetic

Retention of Information

  • Correct answers were chosen for the quiz questions between 75% and 100% of the time

  • The mean correct answers was about 88% (or 88% retention)