The Dashboard provides a summary of The New School’s financial data, enabling users to interact with data visualizations for comparative analysis and personalized insights into the university’s revenue, expenditures, salaries, assets, and liabilities.

My journey at Parsons has been challenging, marked by the university’s financial struggles and widespread community uncertainty. This project emerged from growing frustration within The New School community over the perceived disproportionate allocation of wages and funds. The New School is a 501(c)3 designated non-profit and their financial data can be publicly accessed by visiting the IRS website and looking up their data with EIN #13-3297197. The data is extracted from the IRS’s website, loaded and transformed in Excel using Power Query, and visualized with Tableau.

The concept was straightforward: address a significant pain point affecting both me and the broader community, guided by the values instilled by this community—creativity, innovation, and a desire to challenge the status quo. My design thesis aims to simplify the university’s complex financial data, presenting it to the Parsons community—primarily students, parents, staff, and professors—in a clear and digestible format, emphasizing transparency and accessibility.

The Dashboard is a user-friendly tool that transforms financial data from the university’s IRS filings into cohesive and accessible visualizations using creative graphs and charts. The platform design takes a “mobile-first” approach and can be accessed by anyone anywhere and is fully responsive. It also aims to deliver a good user experience with micro-interactions and animations built with JS. It offers customizable filters, allowing users to analyze the university’s financial data from 2018 to 2022, and includes an option to export their findings. Ultimately, The Dashboard leverages the principles of information design to enhance transparency and accountability within The New School community.

To raise awareness regarding the initiative and solution, deliverables were designed for the project. The goal was to distribute the deliverables to The New School community and allow them to display their support for this endeavor. Campaign deliverables include dashboard-branded embroidered caps, transparent decals, and sticker sheets.

This project was my final-year design thesis at Parsons and took two semesters to build. The platform was built from scratch using Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, CSS, JS, Excel, Tableau, GitHub, and Google Analytics. The product photos and mockups were built from scratch and photographed using a Nikon D70 with a 35mm lens. Lastly, the project is covered by the MIT License, which means anyone can fork the repo and build their own “dashboard”, for their school, university, or organization.