Angelena Atlas – Mapping Feminist LA

While attending Logic School in 2021, students were tasked with working on a project around implementing the grassroots theory of change as applied to the worlds of critical design, tech, and ethics. The project that I chose to support was Mapping Feminist Los Angeles is a volunteer working group with the goal of building a spatial and digital network called Angelena Atlas, that recontextualizes Los Angeles neighborhoods through the filter of intersectional feminism online, in print and in person.

The project began in 2016 by Leana Scott, Angelena Atlas is a digital manifestation of the group’s objective and an online consolidation of resources for marginalized groups in Los Angeles. The core objectives of this project is to share intersectional feminist resources, services, and events for womxn in Los Angeles County. We also want users to be able to crowdsource information from other grassroots collectives and create an easy to use and open-source interactive visual representation of resources with filters.

Overview of Data Visualization Prototype

Considerations

In order to understand the current state of the project and what goals we are trying to achieve, we had to consider the following:

How do we define a feminist resource?

What are the best practices in canvassing neighborhoods as we seek to represent all feminist communities and areas of LA?

How can a mapping tool of this nature inspire activism and equitable urban planning models as we seek to build a more feminist city?

Objectives

Within the time period allotted for this project we redefined our scope to accomplish the following:

To share intersectional feminist resources, services, and events for womxn in Los Angeles County?

Be able to crowdsource information from other grassroots collectives?

Create an easy to use and open-source interactive visual representation of resources?

Resource Detail Screen

Existing State and Constraints

Due to the group being completely volunteer run, the master database of available resources accumulated over the years was in complete disarray. The database of resources was outdates, incomplete, unorganized, and needed much data cleaning before it could be of use.

Since they neede much more help on this end of the project, I had to split my time combing through data as well as designing the visualization.

High Level User Flow

User Flow and Prototyping

The user flow was relatively straightforward along with factoring whether the data on our end was incomplete/missing. We also wanted to give users the option to submit a resource of their own aligning with our grassroots ethos and the new submissions would be vetted by a volunteer every few weeks or so and updated accordingly for data accuracy. By the end of the project, we had a Figma prototype that essentially highlighted 6 essential categories:

Food Pantries or Nutrition Programs

Immigration Resources

Race & Ethnic Centers

Tenant & Housing Resources

Womxn & Feminist Resources

LGBTQ+ Resources

Final High Fidelity UI Screens: Overview, Resource Detail, Search

Key Takeaways & Future Plans

On a personal level, this project demonstrated that data itself is not inherently exploitative or inevitably for-profit. It also illuminated how we can be active participants in defining how our data ought to be collected, disseminated, and used to improve their lives. Overall, there is a movement of shifting civic data from being a resource for the few (urban planners/academics) to being an exploratory medium for everyday citizens and we can reclaim our own agency for how to figure out the world through communal/collective data-sharing.

Future plans include developing the prototype into a usable webapp, eventually scaling the amount of data we can support, automating the resource submission process, and so much more. I wrote about this project in the Logic School Yearbook or keep following the project on their website.