The Public Secrets project explores the often unheard experiences of women incarcerated inside the California State Prison System by providing an interactive interface enabling the user to hear first hand accounts from inmates themselves. Navigating this site, however, was not as easy as I had expected. Firstly, much of the content’s interaction is toggled by simply rolling the mouse over the field. For example, when the mouse is hovered over audio accounts from inmates, the audio track is automatically played. Similarly, if the mouse is then moved away from the field, the track stops playing and the user loses their playback location and would have to restart the entire track in order to listen to it fully.
In addition, navigating the site was hard because the user does not have much control over where they are redirected when they click on a quote. The site is divided into several main sections: Main Menu, Inside/Outside, Bare Life/ Human Life, and The Public Secret/Utopia. By opening any of these sections, the user is confronted with a selection of (mostly) randomly rendered rectangles with quotes or sections of transcripts from interviews with inmates. While this does produce a great aesthetic, it proves difficult to navigate through the site’s connection with intention. Instead, using the site feels somewhat like being led on a tour and going with the flow, rather than actively choosing direction.
One of the aims of the project is to highlight the juxtaposition between the ‘Public Secret’ that is the prison industrial complex and the relatively utopian world that exists outside the walls of a prison. Similarly, this project differentiates between the ‘human-life’ experience of not-incarcerated citizens and the ‘bare-life’ nature of inmates. Instead of being defined by what they make of the opportunities they are given, inmates are constricted by the walls that imprison them, losing humanistic identity. In the designer’s statement, he writes about how the rectangles containing quotes and other content could be considered to be too simple of a representation of such a complex issue. He qualifies this issue by converting it to an advantage – using a treemap algorithm, the quotes are automatically formatted to fit inside the boxes. He compares this to the conformity of inmates inside jail cells – they are squeezed to conform to the identity of ‘inmate’ they have been labeled with. This conformity between the visualization process and the rehabilitation process therefore supports that this is an appropriate method of visualization.
I also think the project is successful for the same reason it can be tedious. As I mentioned before, it is not easy to actively navigate the site. Rather, you are taken through the site and are exposed to real life situations along the tour. I think the project is successful because the usability emulates the criminal justice process – the user (or defendant/inmate) are somewhat powerless and are at the whims of the ebbs and flows of a system much larger than themselves.
