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TritonEx
An Exclusive Experience
TritonEx is a mock membership program designed as an exclusive college experience at the University of California San Diego for undergraduate STEM majors, providing membership exclusive perks such as priority class registration dates, bookstore discounts, free on-campus parking, and designated areas on campus designed solely for STEM major students. This program was designed as an intervention to help publicize the issue of inequality at UCSD.
My Roles
Visual Designer
UX Designer
Design Research
Prototyping
OBJECTIVE
The basis of this project was to create a mock program exclusive for STEM students to that exaggerated the underlying differences between STEM and non-STEM students by creating a believable, exaggerated program that favored STEM students. Our goal publicize the inequality between STEM & non-STEM majors and elicit a reaction from students.
RESEARCH
University
Investigation on the university's website showed the university's funding went more towards STEM affiliated incentives such as climate, robotics, and microbiomes. Additional research revealed an open letter from a UCSD Literature professor that was addressed to the university's chancellor. The letter details how the university is primarily concerned with profit-making views STEM and research initiatives as "investments", while labeling funding for Humanities departments as "costs".
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Student
To better understand the divide at a student level, we conducted interviews and combed through a student run Facebook page emphasizing the indifference's students expressed.
Personal Story
"During career fair, I didn't feel like there were many opportunities for myself as a communication major. Most of the booths were geared towards STEM majors and as an international student, I need to find an employer to sponser me. But at the career fair, I was rejected by a lot of the UCSD employers because they do no provide sponsorship for non-STEM majors."
- Nina, Communications Major
DESIGN PROCESS
Brainstorming
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Different Intervention Ideas
Mock Career
Fair
Parody
UCSD
Introductory
Video
Exclusive
Membership
Program
PROTOTYPING
Digital STEM VIP Card
Our first iteration of our prototype of the exclusive membership program was a specialized ID card that would be promoted for only STEM major students to receive the upcoming year. However, the limitations of this prototype was the difficulty in promoting the benefits the program. We needed a platform to advertise the overly exaggerated benefits of TritonEx.
THE FLYER
As the lead visual designer of this project, I designed this flyer to mimic the style of typical UCSD advertising and flyers to help portray the program to as real as possible to better elicit real reactions from students who believe such a program would be implemented at UCSD.
THE WEBSITE
We designed a website in similar fashion such that we mimicked the style of normal UCSD website. This website included all the information students needed about the program such as launch dates and registration
THE INTERVENTION
The launch of our mock program began with posting the flyer all over campus to catch the attention of students who were then lead to our Facebook page we created where students voices and reactions towards the program could be captured.
OUTCOMES
Though some students did not fall for our mock exclusive membership program, our intervention was successful in that it created at outlet for students to publicize their opinions and personal experiences with the issue were tried to publicize: the division of STEM vs. non-STEM majors at UCSD such that the university favored STEM majors. Listed below are some of the reactions students had on our program.
How many people viewed our website
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Stats on how many people interacted and viewed our page
