About this Project
This project was completed by a team of graduate students in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University for the course, CCTP-506: Fundamentals of Technology under the supervision of Professor J.R. Osborn.
Our Team
Camille Alejandro
At Georgetown University, Camille works as a Digital Communications Associate at the Office of Advancement while also doing a master’s in Communication, Culture & Technology part-time. She is obsessed with (in no particular order): food and its politicization, influencers and the monetization of self, public health communications and misinformation, and storytelling to promote social justice.
Mary Margaret Herring
In her graduate studies at Georgetown, Mary Margaret has investigated the relationship between interface desgin and user behavior. Her recent projects include examining how social media may be redesigned to encourage analytical user behavior and how non-technical users make sense of web-creation platforms like WordPress and Webflow. More information is available at https://mmherring.com.
Meera Kolluri
Meera’s academic focus at Georgetown University lies at the intersection of data privacy policy, surveillance studies and social justice. Her current projects assess methods and consequences of monetizing the human body through the use of technology. She aims to create accessible systems of accountability to ensure just technological innovation.
Grant Lattanzi
Like the rest of the team, Grant is currently working towards his MA in Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University. Grant's research focuses on the social implications of technology, and how people construct meaning in/with technology. For more information, visit https://www.grantlattanzi.com/
Site Design & Resources
Colors
Since we are not affiliated with the Solid Project, we wanted to draw from Solid’s branding while not copying it. For this reason, we adopted a color scheme based around their core color, royal lilac. To distinguish our project, royal lilac was used sparingly throughout the site. The team used the color schemes generator, Coolors, to test different colors before arriving at our final palette.
Graphics
As mentioned previously, we found it important to link our site to the Solid Project since that is the technology we are analyzing. However, it was also important to separate our site’s visual appearance from the official website of the Solid Project. For this reason, we kept the idea of PODs being visually portrayed as hexagons but used our color scheme and modified illustrations from the open-source illustrations platform, UnDraw, to create a new visual experience. The graphics illustrate that each user’s data (yellow dots) is stored in a POD and access to that data is controlled by the user themselves. The dashed circles behind users on the landing page graphic indicate that data can be accessed and written in the PODs by applications and other users who have the owner’s consent.
Website Theme & Additional Customizations
This site was created using the OceanWP theme on WordPress. Much of the page design was done using the Elementor plugin. Changes that could not be customized in the Customizer or Elementor were modified with CSS. Aside from minor changes of color and font, the most notable elements added to the site with CSS include the sticky page header and navigation bar and the sticky sidebar menus on several of the site’s inner pages.
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