Primary Motivation

1. The Primary Motivation (Why)
   I selected online shopping because of its relevancy in today’s world. Online shopping is a rather recent development, not really becoming popular until the early 2000s. I thought it would be interesting to investigate the comparison of people who shop in-store versus shop online.
2. The Primary Goal (What)
   My primary goal for this project is to expose how online stores are becoming so profitable so quickly. I plan to display the convenience of online shopping to viewers.  I will explain that although the clothes might be cheaper, they might not be better quality.
3. The Role of Visual Art in Civic Engagement (Context)
   The visual engagement opportunities in this project have to do with the size and quality of the stacked shirts in the visual art. The retail pile is on the left, here the shirts displayed are of higher quality and price. The online pile is situated on the right, the stack of purchased shirts is much taller than the retail pile. The idea is that both piles of shirts were purchased for the same amount of money, the difference is in the quantity and quality.
4. Your Interaction with the Data (Process)
   When working on this project I expected to find data showing the vast majority of people preferred online shopping. Although I was successful in thinking online shopping would be more popular, I wasn’t prepared for just how many people make up the vast majority. A study was done by the clothing brand ASOS from 2004-2007 to compare their in-store sales and their online sales. The study showed that in those three years retail grew by 4.6% and online retail grew by 130%.
5. Connect your image to the message (How)
   I chose to do stacks of shirts to show the comparison of size- kind of like a very knock-off bar graph. The shirts were made up of different qualities of material to showcase the varying price points, as well as the quantity of shirts bought for the price. Visual representation helps audiences to understand what is actually being compared, but having graphs and statistics helps to show the facts of the matter.
6. Changes in final submission The changes I made were primarily in relation to the visual representation. Previously, there wasn’t really a way to show the statists or facts backing my statements, so I realized I had to fit some sort of measurement into my project. I decided to use a graph showing the progression of the popularity of online stores, the example being ASOS. I then inserted stacks of clothes to be the visual material being measured or graphed.

( the graph is also completely different)