Synopsis

Near the end of my degree I wanted to chal;lenge my skills again in a one week long hackathon. Our client was with Atria Tech Coop, a startup company aiming to aid organizations bring about change to poverty in Vancouver. Our success in the hackathon led us to participate in launching what we created in the hackathon.

Atria Voices

How do you feel about the poverty problem in Vancouver? Is it even solveable? In a perfect world it will be solved, but this is no fairy tale. So how do you feel about poverty reduction? How would you an individual even approach it?


Thats the key. The individual. During our hackathon the main question that drove our design's creation was: How can we change the perception of poverty reduction to perhaps kickstart action in an individual? By telling stories of individuals to highlight the little details an actions an indivual does and recieves that changes the course of an individual's life. By shrinking the scope of a wicked issue to percievable small actions accomplishable by an individual.

Stories

An important aspect is sharing the stories of those that are affected by poverty. They narrow the wicked problem into tangible and understandable aspects of daily life. To provide this aesthetic we wanted a sidescrolling website to not only extnd the time the story stays on screen, but to also give it enough room to sink in.

Atria - Atrium - Heart

Each story we want to share are personnel and organic. Seeing how the name Atria derives from the heart, it felt natural to derive a centerpiece from a heart.


The thought process was to extrapolate an organic collection of shapes to represent a community from the shape of a heart and the word "Atria."

FutureDesign

Of course there is room to grow. As the startup gets bigger it would be beneficial to include more and more stories, in which case the design needs to be able to still drive the gallery feel.

Design Lead

After the hackathon, I was invited to join a team of 20 designers to finish and launch the hackathon website. I led a team of 5 designers in recreating Atria Voices and I gave them the oppurtunity to begin from scratch and from a poitn of convergence of the previous version. This gave our team adequete time to get used to each other and to experience the challenges that developoed during the hackathon.


Unfortunately due to conflict with internal management on the business side, Atria never took off the ground and the project has been postponed since.