UMMA Voting Exhibit
2021 — 2022
Environmental Graphic Design
Spatial / Exhibit Design
Socially Engaged Design
A civic space in an art gallery that enabled students to register to vote, request their ballots, and vote early.
From the Fall of 2021 through the Fall of 2022, I collaborated with a team of designers and researchers as part of the Creative Campus Voting Project to design and launch two satellite city clerk’s offices on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, allowing students to register to vote, receive their ballots, and conduct ballot research to better understand issues relevant to Michigan’s 2022 midterm election. The project resulted in two interactive voting spaces ran by the Ann Arbor City Clerks as well as a trained cohort of UMICH voting fellows.
To view the other half of this project, click here.
The Space
The installation was located in the University of Michigan Modern Art Museum (UMMA). The museum’s street-side location on central campus allowed for heavy foot traffic and visibility.
Similar to our Duderstadt Exhibit, we created defined sections within the space, thinking carefully about visitor flow and how to create definitive moments along one’s journey through the space.
The four distinguished sections were :
— welcome area
— city clerk satellite office
— voting room
— celebration area
The Stenn Gallery, in which we created the clerk’s office, is enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glass walls. This materiality served in our favor, adding visibility and allowing people to peek inside and see the voter registration process.
Welcome Area
The first stop in the journey was the Welcome Area, designed to welcome students into the exhibit, orient them to the space, and encourage them to make a decision about where they want to vote. A trained peer mentor was positioned here to provide a reassuring helping hand and calm any nerves about the process.
Right away, students were posed with a gentle but direct question : are you voting in-state or out-of-state? I designed environmental graphics with QR codes to connect students who wanted to vote somewhere other than Ann Arbor with their relevant voter registration information.
City Clerk’s Office
Located within UMMA’s Stenn Gallery was our satellite Ann Arbor City Clerk’s office. In this spacious and quiet room, visitors were directed first to fill-out a registration form before sitting down for a one-on-one conversation with Ann Arbor City Clerks where they were able to ask any lingering questions and complete their registration.
The space was designed to be soft and inviting with simple graphics that disclosed some of the most salient, and perhaps motivational, information relevant to the midterm election.
A custom-designed registration form further simplified the process and simple voting benches furnished the space.
Voting Room
Right next door to the Stenn Gallery, the museum’s multipurpose room provided a private space for those wishing to fill out their ballots that day. The room was equipped with six voting booths and simple, informative vinyl graphics on the wall. Once again, we aimed for a conversational and reassuring tone-of-voice that fostered a quiet and contemplative atmosphere within the room.
Celebration Area
The last stop in our young voters’ journey was to drop their ballot in an official ballot drop box, located at the museum’s central entrance. Not wanting this moment to feel anti-climatic, and wanting an experience to serve as a celebratory endpoint of their voter journey, we created the Celebration Area. This space consisted of three parts: a selfie mural, a button-making activity, and the ballot drop box.
The Button Mural consisted of roughly 2,000 colorfully designed buttons and functioned as a visual “pop” for people both entering and exiting the experience. We hoped that this visual focal point would convey the celebratory and energized tone of the moment, and perhaps serve as a backdrop for selfies / photos.
The Button Making Cart functioned as an interactive activity that suited both introverts and extroverts. A peer mentor was stationed here, designing and making buttons in their down time, and congratulating people as they dropped off their ballots in the nearby dropbox. This activity provided us with a way to spread voter pride across campus and advertise the space to other students, and provided students with a tangible and memorable takeaway.