Table of Contents 📍

Summary 📝

To review, The History of You is an interactive fiction piece that explores the effects of intergenerational trauma (defined as trauma passed down from initial survivors onto their descendants) on people of color descended from immigrants in the past 50 years, and their view on mental health treatments and their relationship to their culture.

<aside> 🔑 Our interactive explainer from P1 aimed to:

  1. identify the components of intergenerational trauma and their corresponding negative effects passed down through parenting
  2. convey an emotionally resonant story with which readers can potentially self-identify
  3. illustrate the complex, often ambivalent decision-making within each generation by asking the reader to make choices, and then showing the outcomes

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Expanding on our goal from P1, we hope to help our audience to become more aware of how this implicit force is affecting their life. While we know that this is not a direct solution, we were inspired to create this project because we believe increased awareness is the first step towards breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.

Thus, we aimed to create a website that features our interactive fiction piece, accompanied by relevant research articles and external resources for those seeking help with their personal health and wellbeing.

<aside> 📌 Now, our website in P2 aims to:

  1. provide our audience with a deeper understanding of the root causes and effects of intergenerational trauma through our featured explainer
  2. curate and collate relevant research articles and ways to get help
  3. offer a safe space for users to begin their own journeys of personal healing and growth

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Primary Research 💡

Article Choice

Since our topic of intergenerational trauma is not widely known, and we wanted to make sure our audience would have a comprehensive understanding of the topic, we decided to include research that answered the following questions:

What is trauma?

What is intergenerational trauma?

What methods have been effective for healing trauma?

What does intergenerational trauma look like for different cultures and identities?

What effects do political events such as war and immigration have on intergenerational trauma?

How is storytelling helpful in healing intergenerational trauma?

Card sorting