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Part 3: Final Project

Summary

This page provides a summary of how I navigated through different steps to develop a data-driven story, “Fast Fashion: The Hidden Costs.” While this topic has come under discussion in many countries, with customers pressing on brands to be more transparent about their supply chain, I believe there is still lack of awareness regarding the environmental and social repercussions of shaking hands with fast fashion.

In a mostly price sensitive and disposable society, where instant gratification has now been made possible through e-commerce, the conversation about customers making careful purchase decisions is likely to fall on deaf ears. However, through this story I wish to present evidence based arguments to unveil the damaging consequences of fast fashion, a trend plaguing the retail environment.

Part 1

In the first part of the project, for my narrative structure I relied upon the “Setup, Conflict and Resolution” framework discussed in Scott Berinato’s book, Good charts: The HBR Guide. This allowed me to break my story down into three high level components: uncovering the retail trends, conveying their implications, and finally calling upon the audience to act. While drafting the outline, I concomitantly ensured that reliable data sources, which were relevant to my story, were accessible online.

With the summary of the project in shape, I sketched data visualizations to serve as an opening ground for further refinement in the next part of the project. These sketches were helpful in allowing me to gauge the strength of the relationship between my reasoning and the visualizations. In some cases, the visualization did not support the premise of my story, as was the case in my first sketch where a fall in proportional expenditure on clothing was evident. In this scenario, I decided to research further to find data which could possibly justify this, as reflected in sketch 2 of the outline. By the end of part 1, I was equipped with the outline, data sources, sketches and story creation medium, which would serve as essential tools for part 2.

Part 2

In part 2 of the project, I started building the wireframe for my story using Balsamiq. Soon into this process, I realized it would be a better idea to utilize Shorthand. Since this was the tool I had decided to use for building my final story, I thought it would facilitate better user research as the storyboard would be closer to the look and feel of my final website. The flow of this storyboard was similar to that of my outline in part 1. However, I created data visualizations on Flourish and Tableau instead of reusing the sketches, due to the flexibility that these digital tools offer in editing elements of the graphic in a way that is most suited for communicating effectively.

After identifying the audience that I hoped to reach through my story, I selected a group of three individuals for my user research with profiles similar to my intended audience. Following this, I used an interview script to identify the elements of the story that I wanted to test, the research objective that I expected to achieve by testing each element, and the set of questions for the interviewees that could help me achieve those objectives. Upon completion of user research, I was able to draw out common patterns of suggestions, which were then incorporated in part 3.

Part 3

Design Decisions

The user research from part 3 helped me gain a crucial perspective to my story. This was instrumental in not only identifying the changes executed below, but also in revisiting important design decisions.

  1. In terms of the use of images, I replaced an image of women’s shoes in my original storyboard with that of a man browsing through a store, hoping to alleviate concerns about gender bias in my story. Moreover, to improve the visibility of graphical and textual information and minimize distraction for readers, I increased the darkness of the image overlay and transparency of the images, wherever possible. Finally, I added a subdued image in the background for the references section instead of using a dark shade, to end the story on a lighter note.
  2. In terms of the visualizations, in the graphic for “Are we spending less on clothes?”, I replaced the vertical bar chart with a line chart to clearly highlight the declining trend. In addition, I restricted the use of color in the pictogram for “How is The Fast Fashion Market Expected to Grow?” and flipped the timeline for the axis to observe convention. Similarly, for the slope chart on “Brands Are Racing to Keep the “Newness” Factor in Fashion Alive”, I switched from using different colors for each slope to only highlighting the slope for Apparel Stores, while moving the rest to the background. Moreover, for the donut chart on “Fashion Research: Survey Results”, to reflect the ordinal range of responses, I used complementary shades of blue, with the intensity of the color capturing the magnitude of the response. Furthermore, for the tree map on the “Estimated Value of EU Imports Involving Child Labor (EUR Billions)”, I decided to remove hierarchies within the tree map and moved one layer of data i.e. regions to the filter dropdown. To improve comprehension, I also edited the title and pop up information to only show the name & value of each category. Finally, the heat map proved to be a challenge for me due to my unfamiliarity with Tableau. However, I was able to work a solution to apply conditional formatting on each column of the table: emissions, energy and water. With three separate legends, I thought it would be easier for users to identify specific savings achieved by producing one less item of each product category. Overall, I tried to restrict the use of color in my graphics to prevent the users from being overwhelmed. For graphics which needed contrasting or complementary colors, I used Adobe Color to select color palettes. I tried to build a consistent theme across my website with the use of light colors on dark images and vice versa, while abiding by a limited set of palettes. At the same time, I wanted to stay cautious of reusing the same color within a section, unless a link had to be established between charts, for example between the two bar charts at the bottom of the infographic.
  3. In terms of infographics, to break the monotonous theme of my presentation and in a way give the audience a “fact sheet” to understand the environmental impact of fast fashion, I incorporated the visualizations and textual information into a single infographic made using Infogram. Although the inspiration for this was sought from the source where this information was drawn from, this was an important design decision that I had to make for my story. I created this histogram using relevant icons to protrude key statistics, while balancing the use of red and gray for visualizations to distinguish important aspects from the unimportant ones. I also tried including the image under the text “Does this mean we are simply wearing plastic?” in this infographic but it undermined the purpose of information dissemination that I intended to achieve here.
  4. In terms of the flow of the story and textual information, I reduced the navigation sections from 7 to 5 (excluding references) to eliminate redundancy. This also allowed me to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the website by introducing fade transitions on Shorthand between images within the merged sections. Moreover, for blocks of text which contained key statistics such as the content in the introductory section, I used custom HTML blocks to change the size and color of these chunks of information for enhancing user attention. Finally, I used a more precise definition of fast fashion in the introductory section and to add more weightage to my argument on child labor, I included additional textual information which could further bolster my argument in the section titled “Who is responsible for this?”.

Final Deliverable

After refining the elements in my initial storyboard and incorporating changes based on common patterns identified in the user research phase, I was able to put together my final website. The link to the final deliverable can be found here: Fast Fashion: The Hidden Costs.

Intended Audience

This story is designed for an audience which acknowledges the importance of socio-environmental theories. In simpler words, it aims to address individuals who realize that human decisions have a bearing on the status of ecosystems, which in turn affect the sustainability of human life and our future decisions. Initially, I was concerned about moving forward with this assumption of my audience being in favor of making sustainable, socially responsible choices, but considering the scope of conversations revolving around critical issues such as climate change and child labor, I thought this leap of faith was much warranted.

Based on this preconceived expectation from the audience, I wanted to bring fast fashion into play. In some very recent conversations with my friends, I noticed how the low price tag of an apparel item in any store was much celebrated. This made me think that we, as humans, are very keen to discuss external costs when it comes to, for example, suing an entity for pollution, but when it comes to our individual decisions, we tend to focus on private costs only. Therefore, I wanted to design this story to raise awareness amongst a fairly educated audience regarding the damage that has come from fast fashion. While I started the story by discussing how cheap clothes are normally considered a good thing, I immediately delve into the problem of excess consumption. Throughout the story, I tried my best to utilize data from different countries to ensure that this trend is registered as a global problem, and not as an issue which only needs to be tackled at a local level.

Since we, as humans, do not like to be dictated about the lifestyle choices we make, I tried using the pronoun “we” instead of “you” at various stages in my story. The only intention here was to give an impression that we all, including myself, might have given into the trend of fast fashion. At the same time, I wanted to tone my story for an audience of Gen Z and millennial segments since the literature review for this project suggested a greater adoption of this trend in these population sub-groups. However, this was not a prominent aspect of my presentation, and was only implied on a subtle level through the use of imagery which was more relatable to this audience. Moreover, the repeated use of questions throughout the story was to trigger a thought in this audience, before a specific argument was presented to them.

From my acquaintances, who I would consider to be part of the intended audience for this story, I have often heard arguments in favor of textile imports from emerging economies. This is based on the flawed notion of how textile trade drives employment in these regions. While this may be true to some extent, I wanted to present two key counterarguments here: young workers in these regions do not get a fair share of compensation for the effort they put into the supply chain; and child labor severely undermines other developmental outcomes such as education, for these underage workers. If I could redo this story, I would wish to add more statistics/ visualizations which could help me bust possible myths related to the textile industry, using specific data.

Reference Materials

  1. For data sources utilized, the source has been provided in the footer of each data visualization on the website.
  2. For images used, author credits have been mentioned under the footer for each image used on the website.
  3. For statistics quoted, in-text citations have been added along with a reference section provided at the end of the website.

Data Sources:

From part 1 of the project, the following data sources were finalized and used for visualizations embedded in the website. A downloaded copy of the datasets below can be found on the Github Repository here.

Images:

Images used for the website were obtained from two sources only: Pexels and Unsplash. A downloaded copy of the images can be found on the Github Repository here.

Statistics:

Textual information and key statistics quoted on the website were sourced from the following websites, articles or reports: