Visual interactive overview about woman condition in the world

Women on Web is a prototype of a web-based interactive social network that aims to be a digital dynamic representation of the women condition in the world. This platform is a visual interactive overview  conceived for sharing, organizing and visualizing contents about women (articles, photos, poetry, researches, blogs) and provide a comprehensive  visual dynamic map about the topic.

People can navigate the social network through an information architecture that allows a topic-oriented navigation instead of a traditional content-oriented one (i.e the Facebook wall). This type of organization, unlike the single content-oriented one, doesn’t prioritize the single content but rather the context and the semantic area in which that content is immersed.  The dynamic visual representation of topics will change according to the overall sharing behavior. The goal is to improve understanding of the evolution of gender gap trough the visualization in order to help develop policies that can help countries raise the living standards of their citizens.

Design Questions:

Can design be a political instrument? Thanks to information technology, data visualization, and the Internet, can we build new visions for a new type of society? For example, a society that privileges the dialogue and debate?

Women On Web: the Explanatory Video

WOW women on web visual interactive overview about women condition from Enrica Be on Vimeo.

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How it works
The innovation that I have brought into the social network is about visualization. The entirety of content shared creates an interactive dynamic map accessible to all network users and users can use specific visualization tools to understand how gender related issues are connected to each other.

Studying the most common social network as Facebook and Twitter I realized the user experience focuses on single contents or on a series of contents but not for the entirety of the network. We don’t know what’s the main topic discussed on facebook and we don’t know if that topic has a negative or positive connotation, we also don’t know how that topic is related to the other ones that are being mentioned all over the platform.

This is  this reason why  I decided to create a thematic social network to allow users to immediately have an idea of what is the main topic and how it’s related to others. to do this i created   wide-ranging visualization tools that can be used to navigate the network.

To be more clear this social network appears like a big interactive pie chart  .The “pie chart” is a metaphor, indeed the shape was the most challenging part of my research.

How to represent the amount of data and its characteristic? Which are the most discussed topics about women?  What are the users perceiving positive or negative? In which way the same topic is discussed in the USA, Afghanistan or Japan?

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W.O.W Homepage

WOW is designed to address these questions through the formal changes of the main map. The interface is a combination of maps and diagrams that dynamically summarize all content posted. Maps and diagrams allow a shift from the overview to a particular view (single content).

Although this type pf visualization could be used for other social networks, I believed that creating a Social Network about women was fundamental: First to raise awareness about gender discrimination, which despite having a significant impact on economic growth, is often understated and invisible to main public, this was one of the most challengeing things : make visible the invisible.

Second: A Famous quote of V.Woolf: “As a woman, my country is the whole world.” And I think that we need to visualize it.

The project aim was create a new storytelling about women through the users contribution,(bottom up) and thanks to this innovative type of visualization, give the possibility to analyze the social network.

I think that WOW could be a strategic instrument, because it can be the litmus test through which is possible to read women needs and desires from all over the world and because it offer an intercultural overview, and favors the spreading of knowledge about women and gender gap.