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Introducing our digital Report to the Community!

I’m thrilled to introduce our 2014 Report to the Community – in an all-new digital format. While I’m a little abashed about publishing a 2014 report when we’re three-quarters of the way through 2015 already, I think this one was worth the wait.

reporttocommunity1The Office of Arts & Culture has been publishing a paper Report to the Community for decades – this document is a wonderful resource to look back and see how the Office has progressed. However, every year we struggle with representing the work we do and not boiling it down to long laundry lists. As our society reveres pictures, emoji and memes over long blocks of narrative, I start to wonder who reads the annual reports we distribute (last year’s was 40 pages long!). Are they a useful tool to share the work we do, or are they just a lot of work?

As I was pondering this year’s report, we were in discussions with a local company, Community Attributes, about mapping our cultural space – and I realized that maps would be a valuable counterpart to lists. I got more and more excited about mapping the deeper we got into the project. As a city that is contemplating how we expend our resources and who benefits from those investments, what better tool to visualize exactly where dollars are directed than a map?

reporttocommunity2And thus this year’s digital 2014 Report to the Community was born. In here, you’ll find maps of all our public art and activations, where all grant dollars were directed, a prototype for the cultural space mapping that launched this project. Please click around, check it out and tell us what you think.

http://www.seattlearts.report/

This version is our first foray into the digital report world. I’m really proud of this piece, and I’m already plotting how to make it better and more useful next year. Which is just a couple months away….

 

Calandra Childers, Deputy Director, Office of Arts & Culture