Crux

The Inspiration

It started with a conversation. Or more accurately, our surprising inability to have a productive one. We began the day with a simple, abstract question: how might we empower women to take space amongst their peers? Over the course of answering this question, our all-woman team found ourselves reminiscing on times when we felt other-ed or minimized and found a commonality in our tendency towards blaming ourselves for inequality we faced. Additionally, as we continued to discuss our own experiences, we found that it was only in reminiscing that we could even identify our experiences as stemming from inequality. This, along with our research into what resources currently exist online, led us to identifying a problem: Women often lack the vocabulary and recognition to speak about our experiences, and identify them as the product of inequality. This leads to moments we regret – moments when we wish we'd spoken up, but didn't know how to.

With Crux, we hope to solve this problem. By providing an interactive dictionary for women, we hope that we can empower women to utilize this learned language instead of feeling helpless.

The Product

Crux is a dictionary of womanhood. Its mission is to help women and nonbinary people a vocabulary to define their experiences and make sense of the systems in place that work against them. It is a safe space. Our aim for Crux is for it to bring together a diverse group of people to connect over their shared experience, using a structured experience in the form of a dictionary. The interface is simple, with the focus on the words that define our lives. Each word leads to a definition page, with the "social etymology" of the word, describing how it came to represent a facet of womanhood and movements made to redefine or counter it. There is a community aspect to Crux as well– we aim to bring together readers of the website through a story feature on each definition page. Our hope here is that much like in life, the community of supporters can work to redefine what it means to be a woman in this world.

The Process

We began by using good old-fashioned pen and paper. We've linked some of our original designs in the image gallery. In this step we were trying to figure out what we wanted the overall aesthetics and flow of the application would look like. We wanted to balance soft femininity with power and clean design. Ultimately we decided on a celestial theme with the name Crux, an aptly named star that to us, represents a pivotal point. From here, we transitioned to researching web development practices and making wireframes. The bulk of our work was creating the wireframes and content for the website, so that we could fully manifest our vision.

The Future

In the future, we hope to code this thing up! With the time we had today, we focused on wireframing the application to completion, and began research on developing the website. We plan on using a Vue based framework to develop the website on and will be looking into database options to house the website's entries. Once the website is up and running, we hope to spread awareness of the platform to our communities, as well as making it available as a resource to women in the workforce.

The Hope

We learned quickly today that gender inequality is not a problem with a quick fix, but we hope that Crux can help to make the conversations surrounding the issue a little easier to have.

Built With

• figma
• sketch