Milestone 1:

• Description of your project including the topic and message you’ll be communicating. Include your inspiration, goal, and intended audience for your site.
• Visual design for your project. This could be a sample mockup or hand-drawn sketch. You can include multiple designs if you haven’t yet decided.
• What libraries or APIs you’re considering using. Include any research you’ve done in this area.
• Content or sources needed for your project

Description of Project

My topic for this project is Women in the Outdoors. As someone who enjoys outdoor sports like telemark skiing, climbing, and mountain biking, I think about this a lot. Although outdoor recreation very publicly has a “the more the merrier” sentiment, there are very exclusive undertones and double standards that affects women in different ways than men. I want to shed light on this dynamic with my website, and express the implications of this inequality. Since these have been my lived experiences for years, I was so grateful to stumble upon this article a few years ago. “Do Not Go Outside to Cry” is a big inspiration for this website. My intended audience is rather large, I hope to reach anyone who participates in outdoor recreation. Spreading awareness of those who have experiences that differ from our own is extremely valuable in seeking equity with any social issue, and women’s experiences in the outdoors are no different.

Visual Design of Project

To increase ease of access to the information on my website, I want to minimize scrolling. The interaction will be clicking on each box on the page, which will cause an info box to pop up on the screen. To make the info box disappear, click the box on the woman’s body again. I will try to fit the boxes so all of them can exist on the screen at the same time, but I’m not sure I am good enough at CSS to make that happen. I look forward to experimenting with animation effects for this interaction, whether that is toggling heights / widths with jQuery, or using a completely new library.

Each info box will contain new information (corresponding to the body part clicked), to highlight how intense it can be to experience unfair treatment as a women in the outdoors.

Libraries or APIs

Since my website isn’t super data heavy, and is more graphics heavy, I think I will use a Library rather than an API. I found the library Cropper which may be neat to use instead of the interaction I described above. I could have one fixed box the user could drag around, and once it lands on a “hot zone”, the information will pop up.

Content or Sources

I will be researching statistics of outdoor recreation, reading interviews of famous athletes, as well as reading articles in prominent outdoor magazines regarding this topic. In addition to the link I shared above, I will look to this interview of Caroline Gleich (a personal role model of mine), this survey of 2,100 women, and hopefully more articles like this one on the outdoors gender gap.

I also want to do more research on effects of body image, clothing and gear marketed towards women, and sponsorship offered to women.