Partner

Afterlives of Conviction Project

Duration

July-August 2020

Role

Lead Designer & Design Researcher

Overview

The possession of a criminal record can leave post-incarcerated persons feeling walled off from society, extending a sense of imprisonment beyond the completion of a sentence. The Afterlives of Conviction (AOC) Project seeks to challenge the use of criminal records, particularly as a determinant of job fitness, by sharing lived experiences of people searching for work post-internment. The collected narratives demonstrate the detrimental long-term effects of criminal records and surface opportunities for compassionate policies to ease reentry into public life. The project team desired a digital home for these stories where they could be accessible to a broad public and ally communities of interest around criminal justice reform. Through a process of co-design, the two month engagement resulted in the design and initial build of a digital platform which centers the collected first-person accounts of job-seekers struggling to find work after receiving a criminal conviction.

Process

The design for Afterlivesofconviction.org developed through a series of virtual co-design sessions with members of the AOC team, mediated through tools like Jamboard, Adobe XD and Optimal Workshop. These co-design events led to a web design concept revolving around the true accounts of post-incarcerated persons as they searched for work. Organized into six distinct themes - captivity, discrimination, stigma, reentry, work, and risk - the stories relate the complex ways in which criminal records harm those who carry them, as well as the families and communities of which they are part.

The objective was to encourage website visitors to steep in the narrative content belonging to the six themes, each with their own dedicated page. Interaction design paces the presentation of information, allowing scrolling through the page to recall the experience of leafing through a book. Original artwork by Ana Holschuh brings the emotional quality of the narrative themes to life.

Besides serving as a platform for storytelling, the Afterlives of Conviction Project website prototypes a way to democratize access to academic research. Each theme page directs to journal articles and resources from the field of criminal justice embedded within the site. This permits visitors access to these ideas without a costly academic journal subscription.

Co-design with the Afterlives of Conviction team also yielded the creation of a visual identity to reinforce the narrative delivery: It is bold, honest, and unwavering. A style guide will support the AOC project team as they continue to grow and expand the website’s collection of stories and research.

Outcome

This co-design engagement produced a scaffold and comprehensive guide to amplify and support the work of the Afterlives of Conviction team in communicating the human impact of a criminal record. As the body of work expands, the AOC team will be able to independently adapt the website to bring new stories to the fore.

Project partner Melissa Burch had this to say of the co-design experience “I came to Megan with a tight timeframe and a big idea not fully conceptualized. I was impressed by how quickly she was able to grasp what I was after and bring it to life.” ◍