A Better Way Home

Client
MASS Design Group, Enterprise Community Partners, Wells Fargo

Year
2022–2024

Location
National Building Museum, Washington, DC, USA

National nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners partnered with MASS Design Group to open an exhibition galvanizing support for the winners of the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, on view at the National Building Museum. As part of the Challenge, Enterprise selected six winning innovations responding to three key housing issues — Resident Services and Support, Financing, and Construction.

I strategized a series of illustrations that emphasize the impact of the prize-winning innovations and executed them, which became a key component of the exhibition and proved the impact of the grant winners to National Building Museum visitors.

Read about the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, including the 2023 grant winners, here.

MASS Design Group was tapped by Enterprise Community Partners to design an exhibition at the National Building Museum of their 2023 Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge. The competition, which drew more than 400 proposals across the U.S. and was funded by Wells Fargo, gave grants of $2-$3 million to six winning teams innovating solutions to housing access barriers, spread across three key areas: Accessibility/Resident Support, Construction, and Financing.

The central challenge of the exhibition was that these innovations responded to real problems of opacity within and between financial, medical, insurance, real estate, and construction industries.

The competition winners had spent years, if not decades, developing the expertise required to meaningfully respond to the failures in these systems. When one is that deep in the weeds, it can be hard to distill insights into a clear and compelling narrative. The exhibit design team, then, became positioned as interpreters.

Initial illustration drafts.

As part of the MASS team, I pitched a series of illustrations developed to answer a question: “What would it look like for these innovations to be brought into communities?” Illustrating the intended users who would benefit from the innovations, I reasoned, would add concrete stakes to the educational project. More than being abstractions, the users would have names, contexts, likes and dislikes. The audience would be able to imagine the material ways the innovations would impact peoples’ lives - all in an engaging, visually interesting format.

I asked countless clarifying questions, shoring up my own understanding of the systems they were navigating. These were not always intuitive, and I realized that beyond inviting visitors to imagine the projects’ stakes, they also served an important explanatory function.They distilled complex cause and effect relationships.

Produced illustrations

The process of iteration and feedback of the exhibit, including the illustrations, prompted Enterprise  and the winning teams to clarify the logic and messaging of the innovations. As non-specialists in the construction, medical, or financial industries, the exhibition design team’s grasp of the complicated systems served as a powerful proxy for the general public. We both asked and answered the questions, “would a non-specialist in the field be able to understand the various levers in managed care? If not, how do we communicate what is salient about this to them?” Key motifs emerged in the design process: hands signified agency; the ability to act. The final deliverables for which I was responsible encompassed half a dozen illustrations, developed and copywritten by me and edited by Enterprise and the teams.

Open between October 2022 and January 2024, the exhibit saw an estimated 650,000+ visitors throughout its duration. Going beyond being merely aesthetically appealing, the illustrations coaxed visitors who may have otherwise chosen to quickly skim the exhibit to discover a deeper level of interest in the innovations and a deep empathy for their users.

Contact

Interested in collaborating? Marisol is available for full-time and freelance work! Résumé and CV available upon request.

andmunstudio@gmail.com
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