Design for social change

Geeta's World is a short interactive web documentary project that invites audiences to challenge a global stereotype about women drivers. Created during a hackathon at the Storytelling Innovation Lab hosted by Mozilla and Tribeca Film Institute, in New York in 2013, the project can be seen live at www.geetasworld.com

Reclaiming the #hashtag

Geeta's World is the culmination of a 5-day hackathon event held in May 2013 by the New York based Storytelling Innovation Lab – a joint effort by Tribeca Film Institute, Mozilla and Ford Foundation.

Abhimanyu from Kiba Design was the designer on the team that created Geeta’s World, which included a filmmaker, an editor, and two coding wizards from Hapyak. Vaishali, the filmmaker, had shot a short documentary video of Geeta – a female taxi driver in New Delhi, which told the story of her struggle to find acceptance at home and in the workplace, having chosen a male-dominated profession. Although the video was not shot with the intention of sharing on the web, the hackathon forced us to rethink its formatting to exploit the advantages of web-native video. We decided to break it up into chapters, and to build interactivity into the narrative that added layers to the storytelling.

We also used this opportunity to experiment with creating positive social change, by inviting viewers to join the twitter conversation on #womendrivers (which is currently a negative one), by adding their own positive comments to the twitter hashtag, and bury the old attitudes and views. We call this framework ‘Reclaiming the hashtag’

The code for Geeta’s World is freely available on Github for anyone to use in their own projects. An open-source approach ensures that people can continue to build and refine what we created in these 5 days