For our projects, we were to utilize the visual rhetoric and communication aspect of maps and our unique perspective as WPI students to tell a story about Worcester through a map. I partnered up with Madeline Zomb for this project. When we first met, we decided to start brainstorming some ideas. We came up with the idea of a crime map to show which areas to avoid, but we thought that might be too depressing (and scary!) to research. Luckily, Madeline started looking at apartments, and felt a lot of frustration using Jump Off Campus to research apartments, so we decided to focus on local off-campus apartments in Worcester.
For our first draft, we used the data from the Jump Off Campus Map.
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| This is the Jump Off Campus map. You have to mouse over the points to get the price ranges. Source: https://wpi.jumpoffcampus.com/map?location= |
But then we decided that our first version was #lame and looked way too sparse for the amount of people who actually lived in that area. So we decided to send out a survey to our sororities and sports teams to get some more data points to plot.
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| Our expertly crafted google form! |
- Our ranges weren't specific enough: for example, someone with $400 for rent could pick two answers and still be right.
- We didn't specify whether rent included utilities or not, which caused some confusion for survey takers.
- People didn't put in their whole addresses so we couldn't accurately plot those points.
- People thought it was for the CIA.
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| The CIA does frequently use google forms to solicit information from unsuspecting college students. |
We plotted the results of the survey to get our first draft! We used one row of colors from Google Drawings so that they would be the same shade of green through red. We put $400 or less as green because generally us poor college students think cheaper apartments are something you want to GO for. We used dark red as the most expensive properties because high housing prices could put college students "in the red". We were glad we got so many responses from our survey because it made the area look a lot more inhabited by WPI students, something that I know my parents were worried about when I moved off campus.
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| A rainbow of color! |
We brought our drafts in today to get feedback - a lot of people said that they really liked the use of colors to denote different price ranges and it was visually helpful. That being said, however, not many people found it very visually pleasing. A lot of our feed back was about the two reds being quite similar and our colors being kind of bland and our background not doing anything to continue the story we are trying to tell. We are going to have to work really hard to create a fresh new take on this map, but I think it's going to come out awesome!
I love hearing about your journey to create this map. I defiantly understand the struggle of finding an off-campus apartment and whenever you sit in a busy area on campus (like the campus center) it seems like apartment hunting is one of the hottest topics this time of year. I really love how clear your map is. However, I am excited to see how you reinvent the space. I feel like you have a lot of room to play with colors and the background space. You may find it easier to make those big choices by narrowing your audience a bit. All of WPI is pretty broad but if you focused on say athletes, you could then additionally rate the apartments by how easy it is to get to the Sports and Recreation Center. This would then allow you to pick colors that match sports/create a sport association. That's just one example but I think you could get really creative with it depending on who you chose your audience to be.
ReplyDeleteI really like your idea behind your map. I have also found a similar frustration when apartment searching. I am also really glad that you sent out a survey, as well as recognized the flaws in it. It gives a humanistic approach to making your map. While you do have a lot of data, all of the pins can get confusing. It could make more sense, like Jess mentioned, to narrow down your audience (maybe to students who wish to pay less than $500 in rent?). Many students also try to stay on the WPI side of Highland as well, so this could be another way to further focus your map. The colors scheme you did chose though is pleasing to the eye and makes sense based on your scale. I'm excited to see your next draft!
ReplyDeleteI was among the people who saw your map draft on Monday. One of the comments that I had then was that the color scheme does not seem to be uniformly distributed. Green seems like a "good" color, as intended. However, all of the other colors are warm and all seem to indicate "bad". Having only one "good" color and four "bad" colors seems unbalanced and your map gives a fairly dismal outlook on off-campus apartments because so many of them are "bad" colors. Perhaps you can re-vamp your color scheme to give a more neutral appearance. Even better, you could make a deliberate choice about your color scheme to influence the viewer's perception of the off-campus housing situation. I don't believe you have stated the rhetorical purpose of your map--if you did I could provide more specific suggestions!
ReplyDeleteAlso, the "Nice try CIA" response is hilarious.
I agree the CIA comment made me actually laugh out loud!
DeleteYour suggestion in class was a huge influence on us changing our color scheme from the greens and reds to neon green to neon pink. We really took your perspective to heart - we realized after your comments that our map showed cheaper apartments as "good" when those are sometimes the worst apartments in the area, and red apartments as "bad" when oftentimes there are a lot of extra utilities included and its not "bad" to have to pay $550 a month when in Boston people pay $4000 a month! Thank you so much for your insight.
DeleteSadly I was not one of the people roaming around during the feedback session and was not able to see your map until now. I think your idea is really strong and I can see it being used quite a bit for college students. However, the icons that you use make the map seem a bit too cluttered. What about maybe using dots instead or shading in small areas (kind of like Charles Booth's Poverty Maps) or like this (http://www.sahilnawab.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/media-20171214.png) which I made for Business Communication last year.
ReplyDelete