Award-Winning Master’s Project Informs College Students About Politics
‘Magenta’ is the Winner of the James R. Chen Award for Outstanding MIMS Final Project, 2024
Magenta, by Master of Information Management and Systems students Soorya Narayan Satheesh, Nyah Mattison, Donte Arrivas-Bedford, Ivana Albernas, and May Simpson, aims to provide young adults with highly accessible local political information to encourage community and political engagement. To learn more, we interviewed the team —
Describe your project.
Nyah: Magenta is a “political starter pack” for college students who are looking to get involved in local politics within their communities but feel uninformed or that they lack the tools to otherwise do so.
We help users feel more engaged with their communities, more informed about political issues, and more empowered to take an active part in these communities, lifting the barrier to access.
We do this through the streamlining of already-existing information to give a direct pathway to the understanding of topics that students care about, and creating new frameworks for understanding complex and multifaceted issues without the large time investment that current research processes require.
What inspired your project?
May: This idea started when I began a contract role at Playstation, where I was exploring what factors make a game “fun.” I worked in local government and policy roles before where I focused on advocacy and community building, but that was the first time I considered the notion “making matters fun is also making matters approachable/accessible. Fun IS advocacy.” So when Professor Anno’s Politics of Information class rolled around that fall, I began musing how interesting it’d be, and what American collectivism could look like, if we all could engage with democracy with similar fervors as following sports games — especially with the 2024 election coming up. So I decided to pitch “Make Democracy Fun Again”, and our team journey began!
Nyah: We were inspired by a couple different things! Other kinds of personality quizzes such as those found on Buzzfeed and frequently shared on social media, as well as political information sites such as ISideWith, felt like a touchstone that was familiar to young users but was also highly shareable and accessible. From there, we thought deeply about what users had told us was missing from their current experience building community and engaging with politics in Berkeley, frequently coming back to the issue of a critical knowledge gap that existed between what users wanted to know and what they felt like they had available to them. When we merged the two, Magenta was born.
Ivana: As a teenager, I was inspired by the 2008 election’s Rock the Vote campaign. Politics felt like something formal and complicated only older adults should do when they were mature and informed enough; yet there were familiar entertainment industry stars on the then-popular MTV television channel explaining the political process in relatable terms and asserting the importance of young adult participation. They spoke openly in their own styles about important, historic issues facing our country through song, dance, and speech. It was also the most diverse representation of voices in politics I’d ever seen. I felt so empowered to get involved as a young adult — a group our capstone research still found near-universally underrepresented over a decade later. Our capstone team wanted to bring that same sense of belonging and empowerment to diverse young voices in politics, in particular at the local level where engagement is lowest yet mutual influence between individuals and their government is highest. We also wanted to highlight various forms of engagement beyond voting, respecting each person’s unique capacity, interest, and experience. Everyone’s voice deserves the opportunity to speak and be heard, especially by those accountable to serving them and their communities.
Soorya: Before coming to UC Berkeley, I was a member of the Indian Forest Service. In this role, the Government of the Indian State of Tripura and the Election Commission of India gave me an opportunity to work as the Joint Chief Election Officer of the State of Tripura for the 2019 Indian Parliament Elections. This experience gave me a ring-side view of the entire process of elections and the challenges involved in election management. I realized how difficult it is to conduct elections to ensure that democracy is maintained. This project impressed me with its mission to support democracy among the youth who are the future of the country.
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Nyah: We first conceptualized the project back in October of 2023, starting with the idea of creating political trading cards for local representatives. We created a research plan and a literature review from October to December of last year, and then conducted 16 user interviews from January to March of 2024. Bouncing off this initial user research, we were able to ideate on a couple different paths for a product that fit within our problem space.
Ivana: Once we chose to move forward with a full mobile application, we spent March to April of 2024 completing its design, machine learning components, and public-facing website. We conducted usability testing with 7 users to ensure our product addressed the needs and interests of our target audience. Their feedback helped us further iterate and refine our final product. We took full advantage of all available project time, working from start to finish!
How did you work as a team?
Donte: Early on, we prioritized understanding our individual strengths and interests, and how to apply them effectively to the project. We established a rhythm of regular team meetings, as well as check-ins with our advisor to assess our progress and collaborate. Our regular meetings and constant communication allowed us to quickly overcome challenges and differences.
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project?
Nyah: Our project was truly interdisciplinary, leaning on multiple different methodologies taught within the I School; from user research in the form of semi-structured user interviews, usability testing, and a quantitative survey to leveraging machine learning technologies and product design, our team combined learnings from across I School curriculum to conceptualize, create, and test our product.
Ivana: In addition to the technical aspects of our education, our I School curriculum emphasized ethics every step of the way. Each subject included an exploration of real-world implementations, whether through case studies or student projects, that forced us to evaluate the performance and social impact of each solution. We learned to carefully examine even our most well-intended and widely accepted practices to ensure we account for anticipated and unanticipated effects. These experiences were especially valuable in the context of a project that interacts with politics, where technical decisions can fundamentally impact people’s lives, freedoms, and opportunities whether they are our users or not. We were inspired by technology’s potential to further empower underrepresented groups, and felt a strong sense of responsibility to ensure we addressed any potential for harm.
Soorya: The I School curriculum provided a comprehensive foundation that was instrumental in the successful completion of this project. Specifically, the courses on machine learning, front-end development, back-end development, and information visualization played crucial roles. The machine learning courses equipped me with the knowledge and skills to implement sophisticated algorithms and models, allowing for accurate data analysis and predictive capabilities. This expertise was essential in tackling the project’s complex data requirements and ensuring robust performance. Front-end development courses were invaluable in creating an intuitive and user-friendly interface. These courses covered essential topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. Back-end development courses provided the necessary skills to build a strong and reliable server-side infrastructure. Specifically, learning about Flask for deploying models on Render and performing inference using endpoints was crucial. Information visualization courses taught me how to effectively present complex data in a clear and insightful manner. Overall, the interdisciplinary approach of the I School curriculum, integrating technical skills with practical applications, was fundamental in preparing me to tackle the various aspects of this project successfully.
We were inspired by technology’s potential to further empower underrepresented groups, and felt a strong sense of responsibility to ensure we addressed any potential for harm.
Do you have any future plans for the project?
May: I think this project left us a lot of tasty breadcrumbs to follow. A future research question and product feature I’m particularly interested in is how we can better enable cooperative democracy by encouraging collective truth seeking as a community. A core of this project laid out different types and degrees of political participation, and these characteristics influenced the range and depth of information our research participants consumed across various political topics. Their participation style all acquired them some puzzle pieces that belonged to the broader picture that, when put together, better informed what truth could be. So, to encourage continuous truth-seeking and informed-votes in this information ecosystem, there does exist a role for everyone to play. How might this process be mediated by human-centered and humanity-centered-design, in a way that’s fun? It’s a big question, yes, and I challenge all of us to ideate on this together!
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Nyah: Magenta helps create a world in which university students feel empowered to enter into the political process and to get connected with their communities in more meaningful ways outside their university campus, thereby removing their barrier to access. When everyone is represented in our democracy, our democracy is fundamentally stronger, and our project does this from the bottom-up by leading students to be more active in, and more in tune with, the communities around them.
Ivana: Our project could allow University of California, Berkeley students’ challenges, such as student housing and safety, to receive more attention and resources. This increased focus can deliver new solutions to improve the social and academic outcomes of future students. Successful solutions could be adapted to campuses that face similar challenges, including other universities within the University of California system like University of California, Los Angeles. Students are not the only ones who stand to benefit. Magenta is community-focused and offers opportunities for individuals to connect with others locally. Direct interpersonal connection with our community allows us to build empathy for and authentic relationships with people of different backgrounds and perspectives. Together we can tackle local challenges that could benefit from university student support. Furthermore, our application is designed to build an enduring and dynamic practice of political engagement that students can continue to apply and build on post-graduation.
