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
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
An introduction to the project goals and methods were presented vis a slideshow
Each animation was played
A brief Survey was administered
Survey Questions and Responses
Summary of Survey Results
The survey was broken into three parts:
General universal design
socio-emotional efficacy
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)