La Raza Interactive Archive

Role – Co-Concept Design, User Experience Art Director, UI design

For – Narduli Studio
Client -⠀The Autry Museum, Los Angeles California

(Update:  This project was an immersion into the art of user experience design with the artistic freedom to do something unique an innovative. I am happy to announce that the project has just won a 2019 C2A Creative Communications Award in UI & UX : User Experience Design as well as the 2020 International CODAaward for Institutional Projects.)

 

From 1967 to 1977 La Raza newspaper provided a voice to the Chicano Rights movement as it unfolded across Los Angeles. More than 25,000 images captured by the La Raza photographers bear witness to this struggle for social justice. Recently gifted to UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, most of the images have never been seen. As part of the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative,we where commissioned to bring the images to life in an interactive experience.

I was responsible for co-imagining the experience, Art Direction, UI Design Logic and directing developers to get desired results as well as project management. The developers using machine learning and ai created a system that scanned through the 25,000 images and then created a navigational neural network based on the relevancy of the photos(dependent on how many times the tags were used). Thus the navigation of the archive is done through the Neural Network that in itself is a visualization of the hierarchy of the archive.

 

This cutting edge navigational system is one of the first of its kind and it can be experienced till 2019 in the Autry Museum.(Update : The artwork is now available to experience in the UCLA Chicano Studies)