Artist Rashin Fahandej engaged with ThoughtWorks Arts to further develop her project A Father’s Lullaby, a multi-platform, co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Her projects center on marginalized voices, and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” Rashin defines her projects as, “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces.
Rashin began her engagement with ThoughtWorks before I joined the team. She originally was developing volumetric film to engage with the exhibition aspect of this work. The second tier of her work engaging ThoughtWorks was to have the interactive website portion of ‘AFL’ worked on.
The team was working with an open source tool ‘Roundware’ that artist /technologist, Halsey Burgund, had created and built Rashin’s website around. The team had been working for a couple of month by the time I joined the team, they had mostly been fixing bugs and doing testing / research. Within my first week on the team we were able to launch a simple redesign of the existing functionality, to promote a stronger user experience. We called this leg of the work Version 1 the next step was to move on to Version 2.
Phase 1: Readability
First week on the team and we launched simple improvements to this design.
You can explore the phase 1 website here.