The Engine Room
Collaborative design at the heart of a social justice report sub-site
Project overview
With a drive to build stronger, healthier information ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), The Engine Room made their research public and usable with a sub-site for civil society organisations to take action with consideration of legitimate, local and lived perspectives in this region.
The Challenge
- Research reports need to sit separate from services to present fair and just perspectives
- Collaborating with external, local designers
- Working within a fixed funding budget
Features
- Branded, responsive custom blocks
- Fully integrated multilingual capabilities with WPML
- ACF Pro
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer
- BlogVault
A
Website Carbon rating
0.11
CO2 per homepage visit
100%
SEO on Lighthouse
The Scene
When your work is rooted in social justice, the research topics are vast and deeply tailored to each situation. This means when you create a website, it needs to speak to a collective while ensuring people’s information needs are prioritised on a local level.The Engine Room supports organisations and activists through consultancy so that tech choices match values and follow Responsible Data Principles. Their legitimacy in this space is down to extensive community research and an attentiveness to systemic injustices that shape the world around us. Because of this, there is a need to make their research readily available to tell the narratives of those behind the numbers. Therefore they approached us to project lead on a reports sub-site that was designed by local artists and developed by Wholegrain.
The Process
Collaboration was at the heart of this project. Our visual designers have many strengths, but it’s not mandatory for us to do “everything, everywhere, all at once” in order for it to be considered a successful project! Open conversations about clear roles and responsibilities meant we worked jointly with the Engine Room’s local designers at La Propia Agencia.
Wholegrain: Designed a sitemap and high fidelity wireframes, for a strong framework to base the designs within. On hand throughout, we provided consultancy and a web style guide for the designers to produce their work in Figma while also considering WCAG 2.2 standards and sustainability design principles.
La Propia Agencia: Produced localised and original designs that truly connects to the Latin American audience the site is created for.
Together: We navigated new tools, work flows, and time zones to successfully apply the beautiful designs to the wireframes.
Wholegrain’s UI/UX Designer collaborating with La Propia Agencia in Figma
The Result
Now, their report “Working towards healthier information ecosystems: Collective visions from civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean” is accessible, usable, and even downloadable. We developed the site in our famous, low carbon open source Granola Go WordPress code base resulting in only 0.11g of CO2 produced per homepage visit on launch.
This means everyone in the world can learn about how people of Latin America and the Caribbean vision for building healthier information ecosystems and isn’t hindered by page load speed. They can see firsthand the creativity of these communities, and learn from their drive to take holistic and active approaches when it comes to tech and social justice.
“I’ve never worked on a website before where we have had zero feedback or changes wanted on the initial design, so thanks for making that so smooth and easy!”
– Helen Kilbey, Associate Communications and Editorial Management at The Engine Room