As a member of the U-M chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America, I and four other team members competed in the annual White Space Design Challenge in early 2020. With the goal of developing a product solution for an underrepresented space or issue, we decided to tackle the area of election misinformation.
We were motivated to find a better way of informing people about local elections, hopefully increasing engagement in an otherwise under-appreciated political space. We landed on an app concept, we named Pollis, that aggregates all current local and national news, candidate backgrounds and social media, as well as voter information and reminders.
However, we wanted this to be a one-stop place for all things elections, so we composed a digital ballot that the user fills out in advance with information found using Pollis, then produces a scannable QR code to allow for quicker voting times on election day.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic preventing our team from further developing the project, we placed as one of the 2020 finalists.
