Overview: Take On Wall Street is a nongovernmental organization with a mission to train activists, cultivate political champions and deliver policy change that brings the financial sector back in service of the real economy. Created by design firm L+R, IsOurEconomyFair.org utilizes one of Take On Wall Street’s in-person training modules to explain how financial institutions have used their disproportionate power at key moments in our history—from colonization to the present day—to counter individuals’ struggles for racial, climate, gender and economic justice and to create an economic system that benefits Wall Street at the expense of the working class.
L+R designed the side-scrolling modules to help learners at all levels digest and understand dense, complex text.
The Notebook feature interaction lets users visualize the connections between their responses and recognize patterns across moments in history.
A team of five designers, developers and strategists took six months to take the project from concept to completion.
Comments by Julia Keller, Chris Martinié and Jenny Rudziensky:
What was the thinking behind the navigation structure? “We started by trying to deeply understand the aspects of a gallery walk that make that learning tactic so powerful. When you are engaging in a live gallery walk, you focus on one image or moment at a time. But if you turn your head or step back, you can simultaneously see the collection of ‘stops’ within the gallery. You have a visceral understanding of how this moment within the walk is a part of a longer, sequential journey or context. The navigation structure was informed by trying to re-create this in a digital space: you are situated within a broader collection of narratives, and you have the ability to visualize your reflections and see patterns across all of those narratives.”
Was the topic of the project a new one for you? “Yes. Exploring how present-day economic injustice is rooted in an intentional history of inequality was a subject very near and dear to our team’s hearts, but not one that we’d had the opportunity to explore through project work explicitly. We leveraged our knowledge of taking live educational experiences and transforming them for the digital space in the context of this new subject matter.”
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “One really fascinating challenge was to create an end product that could be easily managed and expanded by the client team, one with very little technical or design expertise in-house. Starting from complex content requirements and finding ways to templatize modules that could be reused and built from a user-friendly back office—with the end result looking as bespoke and visually stunning as possible—was a fun challenge to take on.”
