Project: Pixel Primaries
Pixel Primaries distils Congressional Primary candidates and their values into pixelated sprites and stats. These pixel elements come in two forms: a web database for prospective voters and a card-based teaching tool for grade school students. Both aim to inform citizens about the candidates running for office, with the teaching tool providing extra resources which prompt students to analyze candidate statistics and perform mock debates.
Problem Statement
01
in the eyes of many young Americans, politics is a tangled mess of corruption and immorality obfuscated by a cloud of complex jargon. In other words, it’s both unapproachable and undeserving of approach. Or is it? Could I use interactive design tenets to decrease political apathy among the youth?
Oct
3
Research: Expert Interview
During my research phase, I had the opportunity to interview Amelia Johnson, who serves as a Legislative Aide to Assemblymember Harry Bronson, the representative for New York's 138th State Assembly district. Throughout our conversation, she stressed the following:
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Down-ballot participation is under looked and vitally important
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We should endeavor to make the government feel less exclusive
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The most successful conversations are offline, person-to-person
Oct
4-25
Research: Interview Series
I also spent 3 weeks interviewing my target age range, 16-25. Many interviewees mentioned the following political pain points:
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Disingenuous optics on the part of politicians
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Introversion and fear of chastisement for political opinions
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Lack of perceived personal impact
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Sheer volume of information needed to understand politics
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Too busy to take part
Finding an Answer
02
With data in hand, I began looking at ways to solve for the many problems I'd found. With a problem statement as vague as mine, there were many directions to look in, as my range of ideation will reveal.
Nov
1-8
Ideation: Boardgames
One of the first ideas that I began developing was a political board game. This seemed to inherently solve many of the issues my interviewees had mentioned.
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Board games foster a sense of face-to-face community in a low-stakes environment. They can encourage discussion and educate players if crafted well enough.
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That said, a quick online search reveals a wealth of politics-based board games, from HEGEMONY to SHASN. Ultimately, I couldn't find a way to make my concepts sufficiently unique.
Nov
9-20
Ideation: Political Compass
The next idea centered around a physical, two-person dial survey based on the Political Compass. Users would ask each other political questions to gauge each other's leaning on the compass matrix.
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In the end, this idea proved to be too abstract. For the amount of effort required to make it, the device didn't feel like it would sufficiently solve for my problem statement.
Nov
21-30
Ideation: Pixel Primaries
For this concept, I decided to step away from abstraction and create a genuinely useful tool. Pixel Primaries would be a web-based tool that focuses on the congressional primaries. The twist would be the pixel aesthetic applied to both the candidates and their political positions, making the overall info less complicated.
Focus on the primaries, if done well, would solve for many of the issues that the interview series uncovered, like the sense of being overwhelmed or the perceived lack of impact.
Pixelation
03
I had begun the project with a promise: I would not let my lack of skills in a particular area stop me from pursuing an idea if I felt it was good. Having now selected Pixel Primaries as my flagship idea, I knew I'd have to learn how to code. Instead of feeling anxious, I decided to lean into this development and use the project as an excuse to develop my coding skills.
Development: Defining the Scope
Jan
7
By the end of the project, I should have:
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A computer- and mobile-friendly website that includes:
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A home page that allows users to find their district and navigate to the district’s page.
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A distinct page for each of Illinois’ 17 districts.
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A page that explains how the stat blocks work.
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An About page that explains the project.
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A Contact page that allows users to message the site admin directly.
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A teaching tool that includes:
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56 Candidate Cards, each of which will include a sprite illustration, the candidate’s district number, a quote, and the candidate’s stat block.
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An info card that includes prompting questions and QR Code links to the stat explanation page.
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Jan 8-
Mar 5
Development: Asset Creation
The process for illustrating sprites began with finding a suitable canvas size, as this would define how many pixels I would have to work with. The Danny Davis illustration I created for the demo proved useful in this regard, helping me to settle on a size of 43px x 43px.
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In the process of illustrating all 56 candidates, subtle shifts were made in the process and style. Shading became more understated, facial details (like eye color) became unique to candidates instead of black by default, etc. This required me to go back and fine-tune older sprites to match style changes
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Development: Sourcing Stats
Mar
6-15
If not for the stat block aspect of this project, Pixel Primaries would amount to a re-skin of any other database on the internet. As such, the stat blocks had to be concrete and meaningful; created from data directly from Congress and sorted/aggregated by an unbiased algorithm. This is where APIs came in handy.
Congress API
Using this API, I can request and receive large amounts of data pertaining to specific congresspeople. For the purposes of this project, I am interested in both sponsored and cosponsored legislation.
OpenAI API
Using this API, I can use AI to read and score each piece of sourced legislation, sort them into one of the eight stat categories, then generate average scores for each category.
Results
04
The website is now live and able to view at https://pixelprimaries.github.io/web/index.html. I've also created an in-depth process book, which is available to download. The book goes into much greater detail about the project and includes appendices with every illustration and the Python API code.