The City of Atlanta is exploring how to represent and address issues of equity in the city, and the Personal Equity Index is a participatory workshop designed to aid in humanizing statistics and quantitative data with qualitative stories about (in)equity. The workshop, developed through an iterative design research process in collaboration with the City of Atlanta, is centered around the idea that equity is personal. In the workshop, participants use workbooks and card decks that we designed to explore how they feel about issues of equity and inequity in Atlanta. The insights from this workshop will enable the City of Atlanta to examine the qualitative stories and personal experiences of residents in Atlanta on both on an individual and community wide scale.
I worked on designing and developing this workshop in collaboration with a team as part of a project for a studio course on Resilience, Equity, and Design. My collaborators were Sucheta Ghoshal, Bang Tran, Xu Zeng, and the City of Atlanta.
We structured the workshop around three key ideas: intersectional identity, personal experiences, and emotions/feelings. Participants are first asked to share three words that best describe who they are, as a way of expressing their own personal, intersectional identity. They are also asked to situate themselves in a neighborhood that they live in Atlanta. They are then asked to discuss their experiences living in Atlanta, focusing both on things they are grateful for and things they wish they could change about the city. Finally, they are asked to discuss their overall feelings about living in Atlanta, and share a story of a time the city made them feel a certain way (e.g. included, vulnerable).