Development, Information, Screens
Part of a Pattern is a response to the 2022 ISTD Student Assessment—an international assessment devoted to typographic excellence with a 30% pass rate. Through this project, I was awarded admission to the International Society of Typographic Designers.
Inform, engage, and galvanize people to address chosen goals for sustainable development in time for the 2030 deadline.
Climate action supporters experiencing climate anxiety as well as more active advocates and activists at risk of burning out.
The solution was to be primarily typographic.
Part of a Pattern is an experiential website that explores SDG 10 Reduced Inequality and SDG 13 Climate Action through systems thinking. It seeks to shift paradigm thinking about how these complex problems are discussed rather than attempting to provide clear-cut solutions. Framed in this way, solution goals were narrowed to:
By acknowledging complexity and providing a framework to begin addressing it, the site attempts to move the dialogue on climate action at an individual level away from typical refrains such as recycling, using less water, and avoiding meat.
The webpage itself is made up of randomized modules from a set graphic language. Every time the site is refreshed, a different version is delivered. Even though each page view is unique, the content, structure, and message remain the same. This pulls the concept of the project through to its execution at a macro scale and speaks to the difference between the individual unit and the system itself.
Mosaic shapes are generated randomly within a structure.
At a lower level, the webpage features interactive elements and animating modules and letterforms within text. This continues to demonstrate the differences between individual nodes and larger systems through abstraction. Without directly stating it, it questions how many elements must change before the system as a whole becomes something new.
Individual characters represent units in a larger structure.
The use of abstraction and experience provide the visitor with room to exercise creative and divergent thinking. Prompting thought with questions rather than speaking at an audience avoids automatic responses and can promote self-discovery of concepts and a stronger connection.
Varied interactions break up the pace of the long-scrolling page.
After researching the SDG goals, broad studies on inequality, and the largest barriers to climate action, it was determined that this project would seek to address the goals in a broad and abstract way rather than try to pinpoint one small problem and address it fully. This widened the audience to a point where easy access to the information became a chief concern, making digital a cost-effective solution.
Systems thinking is a common thread that comes up when researching any complex societal problem. Digging into these texts revealed common metaphors of nodes, atoms, cells to demonstrate the structure of a large network. This became a primary focus for exploration
Because the solution would be digital, interactive and animated explorations were also conducted.
Many of these did not incorporate the metaphor of the letter as an individual unit in typography very well, leading to text replacement and tracking effects.
The coding needed to execute these experiments was learned as I went along and has opened up a new avenue for thinking about design solutions.
These experiments created interesting ways to think about the solution, but an overall structure and narrative still needed to be established. Layouts and typefaces were explored with a focus on modularity.
Turning to the most basic forms in design both simplified and abstracted the solution in a way that worked well. With the final design language in place, an algorithm to dynamically generate the page was created and the final layout could be designed.
