Begin with daily life
Food and clothing offer recognizable entry points into a less visible ecological relationship.
Interactive
Pollinator Education
Educational piece
Interactive chord diagrams exploring relationships between pollinators and plants.
Selected project · Pollinator education
Make the connections.
Make a case for change.
An interactive story connecting pollinators to everyday foods and materials—designed to encourage a local homeowners’ association to reconsider its restrictions on beekeeping.
The challenge
Make an ecological issue
feel close to home.
The project began with a local question: how could I make a persuasive case for allowing beekeeping in a neighborhood where it was restricted? I chose to connect pollinators to familiar foods and materials, giving the topic a place in everyday life.
Created at MICA with an HOA audience in mind, the project combined research, writing, design, and coding.
01
Try the interactive
Follow the story.
Explore the connections.
Move through a short sequence of everyday examples, or explore the full diagram. Select a category in the menu or on the diagram to highlight its connections.
Restored from the original project files, with responsive layout and updated controls. The original relationship matrix is retained; its data source is unconfirmed.
02
The design approach
Give a complex network
a familiar starting point.
The chord diagram brings many relationships into one view. A guided sequence introduces selected connections before inviting readers to explore the larger network.
Reveal connections gradually
Highlighting selected categories keeps the full network from overwhelming the first encounter.
Make room for curiosity
Open exploration lets readers follow a category that interests them after the guided story.
The outcome
An interactive argument
for paying attention.
The finished student project used visual storytelling to make the importance of pollinators more tangible and support a case for reconsidering local beekeeping restrictions. It demonstrates how I combine narrative, data visualization, and interaction around a specific communication goal.
MICA academic project · Courtney Reckord · Intended audience: local HOA leadership. Original code credits a chord-diagram example by Nadieh Bremer.