A full five months after wrapping the Global Warning project, I think it’s time to do a blog post about it! I spent last fall working with a team of students on a National Security Reporting project at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I was an adjunct professor, teaching the students multimedia design and light programming, and serving as the design lead for the project, which was led by Ellen Shearer and Josh Meyer.
After spending a couple of months in the discovery and ideas phases, we decided on several graphics that would address the main topic of the project: How could climate change affect national security?
We wanted to cover a broad array of interactivity with the graphics we selected, so ultimately we did a timeline, a game, a video section, a data visualization, and a series of motion graphics that showed impacts on a few U.S. cities.
We decided to do a ‘You Decide’ type of quiz to help people understand the consequences of different decisions. I thought it ended up being a fun quiz and we encouraged people to share their results on Twitter at the end.
We also did a graphic that looked at the relationships between the different factors (both human and environmental) that could play into national security + climate change moving forward. It was a data viz/slideshow format that I thought worked really well. It lets people just go through and read, or analyze the connections as they like.
I really liked the way the timeline turned out. We wanted to show how different issues (ie, environment, science, politics) had changed over time, but to also to show where different types of events lined up across the board. Timelines are typically not very inspired, but this one serves its purpose beautifully. Nelson Hsu was the designer/developer and worked with all the students on the content:
So check out the project! All the students did excellent work on stories, multimedia, and graphics content, and it turned into a great site that’s an incredible reference about an issue not a lot of media is covering. And be on the lookout for next year’s project…