The Afro-Cuban Heritage Project was a team project conducted under the Interactive Media Masters Program at Elon University. I was included in a team of 6 and sent to Matanzas, Cuba to conduct research on traditional African Museums that highlight the slave trade in Cuba and discuss the history of the people of African Heritage that were forced into slavery on the largest Caribbean island, The conditions they lived under, and their descendants who live as Cuban citizens in the area today.
The purpose of the Afro-Cuban Heritage Project was to highlight the museums dedicated to preserving and teaching the heritage of African slaves imported to Cuba. Other countries with a rich and dark history of slavery such as Haiti and Jamaica are large tourist attractions for Europeans and Americans that visit those islands. Due to the isolation of Cuba many don't know that the largest island in the Caribbean also features a rich and dark African history. Highlighting these museums and historic grounds will not only shine a light on Afro-Cuban history, but also provide the Afro-Cuban natives with a source of income from the tourists that come to visit these landmarks.
I was tasked to be the project's User Experience designer, Planning the Icons, Interactive Map and overall structure of the site. While getting footage in Cuba I would ask my team's videographer to send me the footage and photos taken while at the museums daily to plan around our footage to get an idea of the theme often displayed at these museums, has well as the colors often used by the Afro-Cuban natives so that I could develop a color scheme. It was important to me not to just use the Cuban flag colors but the colors that were being used by the African Natives in Cuba.
The trip to Cuba was an amazing and eye-opening experience for me, once we were back in the United States the real work for me began. I wanted to first take a detailed look with my team over all of the footage taken and get the translations on our interviews into english. I believed my job was to tell their story, I wanted the entire mood and feel of the site to come from the natives, the story board below is a detailed illustration of our work.
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