Athena SWAN Gender Equality

Interactive infographic

Project:

In achieving an Athena SWAN Bronze status for the History department, the partners experienced many conversations with academic colleagues across the UK who had experienced similar challenges in implementing standards and recommendations in an A&H setting. From this experience it was felt that the community would benefit from aggregating best practice and sharing methods.

This infographic was produced by Prof Abigail Woods and Dr Alana Harris for the project 'The Impact of Athena SWAN on Humanities Departments.' The project was funded by Advance HE. A full report is available on the Advance HE website.Research assistance was provided by Dr Dorothee Boulanger. Tiffany Ong of King's Digital Lab was the digital designer and Ben Peppiatt (Freelance Designer) was the creative illustrator.

Process:

This was a very short and low budget project at King's Digital Lab and I was the only person working on it with the project partners. Later they hired an illustrator for the animal drawings. The partners wanted to include a brief animation and/or infographic to be included in the output of a report based on a series of interviews and focus groups and present it in a light hearted easy to understand way, different from the report.

We had a brainstorm meeting and a game was what they thought could be fun for engagement. I suggested snakes and ladders, and they thought it could work with the positives (moving up the ladder) and negatives (sliding down the snake) metaphors. I looked at a lot of vintage game boards as inspiration since they always seem to have great layout, ideas and colours. We had another meeting where we worked on a google doc collaboratively to lay things out and try to get things to sit visually in order. I mocked up a prototype and the partners thought customised animals and scenrios emphasis the point, so they worked together with the illustrator to come up with amazing drawings. They also came up with the other games section with clever tweaks to the titles. I created the images trying to replicate the original vintage board game covers but modernising them. I used a simple modal popup to add extra content.

collage of 6 vintage or vintage looking snakes and ladder game boards in colourful subdue shades.
Some inspiration examples mostly from vintage snakes and ladder game boards
left: grid of 10 by 10 squares numbered 1 to 100, some with text inside, right: grid of 10 by 10 squares numbered 1 to 100, with alternating dark and light grey squares, animals silhouettes in some squares with ladders and dotted swirls scattered across the grid
Initial prototypes done quickly in a document then transferred to code
top: illustration of a zebra shouting to the backs of 3 other zebras with accompanying text, bottom: made up graphic of carers twister with accompanying text
Screenshot of modal popup for additional information
top: title, snakes and ladders game grid background with hand drawn animal illustrations within some squares, showing example of a modal pop up with enlarged image and accompanying text, bottom: six remade traditional board game logos
Screenshot of finished project

Website:

athenaswan.kdl.kcl.ac.uk
(best viewed on a Chrome browser)