My goal for this project was to use a physical timeline to give viewers a more profound sense of the context of historical events and the temporal relationships between them. Careful design and copywriting choices bring the information to the forefront and lead the reader to question their misconceptions about generational wealth inequality.
This project was part of a larger series of educational interventions undertaken by the students of a course called "The Social Construction of Whiteness" taught by Dr. Kathryn Mariner at the University of Rochester.
Two other goals of this design were to illustrate generational wealth transfer and its importance to an individual's prosperity and to encourage the reader to consider the path of their own life in the context of this history. To do so, I chose to demarcate the timeline by increments of 25 years, or roughly one generation. Rather than use tick marks, I created a color blocked gradient background that served to add visual interest without busying the text-heavy design.
I chose to explicitly name the generations in relation to the present, placing a particular focus on those generations recent enough to have influenced the family members the reader knows (I assumed the average reader was college age). The second person perspective directly calls on the viewer to place the events that occurred in those generations directly into the context of their own lives.
Our course learning materials stressed the importance of explicitly guiding one's audience to conclusions about race and racism. Simply presenting facts is not enough to overcome a lifetime of social conditioning. For this reason, I included discussion questions encouraging the reader to consider how the facts in front of them agreed or disagreed with popular misconceptions about racial wealth inequality.
The timeline was displayed as a 100" x 20" print in the student union. After the project ended, the print was donated to the university.
