Be the Boss

A transmedia storytelling project to tell the story (but also the struggles) of migrant women emancipating in western society.

Our collaboration with IRES Piemonte began in February 2020, before the pandemic started. The objective? To design a communication strategy for ALFa to tell the story of resilient migrant women while steering clear of stereotypes and cliches. How did we it? We combined a participatory photography project with a digital storytelling website and an exhibition.

What we did

  • Social design
  • transmedia storytelling
  • Web design
  • Front-end dev.

Client

IRES Piemonte

The process
If you don't have the data, ask to the people

Once we realised we did not have stories or emotions to feed our narrations, we designed an instant-camera-based participatory photography workshop to collect them. In collaboration with photographer Claudia Corrent and journalist Clara Attene, we set up three workshops in three different places, which allowed us to assemble new points of view and insight impossible to get through traditional interview approaches.

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The idea
So maaaaaany materials collected, and then?

Hundreds of instant pictures, vocals, and thoughts... how to narrate them? We set up a scrollytelling story that presents all the collected material through a chapter based navigation that combines insights, instant-pictures and digital photos. Each chapter focuses on single details of the women everyday life: learning Italian, housing, self-confidence, passions, the future, etc. (photo by Vittorio Iandolino, courtesy of Circolo del Design).

Let's scrollytell!
The strategy
Going transmedia!

Using the material we collected, we created a transmedia communication strategy. What does it mean? It implies giving birth to a distributed form of storytelling, something that's developed both online and in a physical space, offering different entry points to different audiences. With the photos taken by Claudia and the women's verbal input collected and collated by Clara, we also created an exhibition in Turin.

The Circolo del Design exhibition

It allowed us to show local citizens who the women involved in the ALFa project are and what they think - women who live within the community, but often remain unknown. The exhibition contextualised the women as both the protagonists of the images and the authors of the images. The subject and the object of the exhibition at the same time.

Why are legends evil?

Legends aren’t evil by nature, but they can be when they require the eyes to move back and forth between the graph and the legend to understand the shapes or colours. By overlapping legends and by using them in closer proximity to the related charts, you can focus the reader’s eyes, making it easier for them to immerse themselves in the content.

Turning climate data into a digital common.
Minding the (diversity) gap in street names.
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Sheldon.studio connects data technology and design to unfold the complex things through great projects.