One of the things that stuck out to me from the beginning of our research around this issue is the amount of statistics that were introduced to us. With my background in social science I’m fairly comfortable with numbers and statistics, but I wonder if the way they’re currently presented is the best to communicate the risks surrounding gun control.

My goal for this project is to use the risk perception and communication literature from the social sciences to support design explorations around statistics and factual information that can be persuasive around the gun safety issue. An important part of this will be making scientific data more accessible to certain audiences. I’d also like to draw inspiration from other successful advocacy campaigns that have used persuasive statistics.

The output for this project will most likely a research report that discusses all the different elements and how they relate to each other in terms of people understanding statistics. An important component of the project will be synthesizing all this information to make it understandable and simple in the report and also in our class’ publication.