Editor’s Note: Carol Overby, assistant professor of design and management at the New School, Parsons, has cofounded, with Aaron Fry and Jennifer Wilson, the Visualizing Finance Lab, a research partnership focusing on ways to improve financial literacy and financial behaviors through visual storytelling.1 Social activism was a motivation. If low-income, low-wage individuals understood money matters, would their financial behavior change and their situation improve? She and Aaron expanded their inquiry by teaching a Visualizing Finance course on financial visualization at Parsons. What Carol learned didn’t quite match her expectations, but it reinforced her determination to promote positive social and institutional changes.
VV Has it been proven that one of the reasons low-income consumers have trouble making ends meet is because they lack financial literacy?
CO Our research has not addressed this directly, but other researchers have found that those with low financial literacy are less likely to show indicators of financial health—saving for retirement, emergency fund, good credit score, low debt.2 This correlation is not causation, although greater understanding of financial concepts and reflection on financial decisions may help improve financial health. In fact, several readings we use in our courses indicate that those in financial hardship often display very sophisticated financial behaviors,3 and that their predicament is more often due to inadequate wages4 and, in the US, inadequate social programs to provide health care and pensions.
However, if you want to talk about social activism, one of the best things we do here, at Parsons, is provide evidence and experiences that counter the perception that poor people are poor because they are lazy.
VV What do you mean?
CO Let me explain: as part of my course, one of the things we do is visualize various financial situations and decisions. In particular, we developed a comic strip project with an NGO called Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners. It is a group in New York that works on financial literacy and offers workshops to people struggling to get by.
The strip tells the story of Emma, a single mother and low-wage earner who needs to take time off to care for her sick mother. Her situation is dire, through no fault of her own. The exercise requires the students explore two aspects of this woman’s life: her financial but also her emotional mindset as she works through them to make ends meet and avoid total bankruptcy.
VV Can you tell me a little more about your students’ discovery process? Does learning to visualize other people’s financial difficulties require they grapple with complex, multifaceted problems?
CO This has been perhaps the most important part of our work. Many of our students are privileged and have difficulty understanding the realities of living with poverty. We hope that the class can improve their understanding, empathy, and possible activism.
First we gave them quite a lot of readings; many of these described ways in which, contrary to what they might think, poor people are really good money managers, much better than rich people. They have a lot of creative and sophisticated expedients and tactics to deal with lack of resources. But reading was only a first step. The students still didn’t seem to understand. So we gave them, as an assignment, to spend seventy dollars or less in the next seven days. This did not include buying food or paying rent—the ten dollars a day were for what you might call discretionary spending.
We only had one or two students in the class who came from less privileged backgrounds and actually related to this assignment. One wealthy student said: “I am not doing this, no way. No one can live on that.” Afterward we had discussions about how difficult it had been to live on seventy dollars a week. By the way, this particular assignment has been used by our colleagues in similar courses in the business program, particularly in the sustainability classes.
VV Were your Parsons students so privileged that they had no clue what it meant to be broke?
CO At Parsons, a significant proportion of our students come from extreme privilege. For example, we have students who live in apartments on Park Avenue, and one who suggested that spending only seven hundred dollars a week on luxury products would constitute a “limited budget.”
One of the preliminary exercises required that students describe a situation involving a tough financial decision. What they came up with were things like “Should I take the subway or call a cab?” Two students chose a story from a television show about two young women who were living on very little money—but they still had enough extra cash to go out for drinks.
VV Could you tell me how the visualization of the story in the comic strip can actually help students develop empathy for what it’s like to barely manage to save fifty dollars a month; to borrow the rent money from a loan shark; or to take your television and your child’s computer to a pawnshop?
CO Drawing pictures forces students to be more intuitive about a situation. Making collages is also quite visceral. Toward the beginning of this class, some students participated in Dr. Kirsten Sorensen’s workshops that asked them to describe their financial past, present, and future as a series of collages.5 It gave them an opportunity to explore their own attitude about money.
This hands-on, collage-making exercise and the comic strip exercises relate to the work of behavioral economists, Kahneman in particular.6 Over the last several decades, a number of studies have been done showing that people do not make their financial decisions based on a rational and analytic process but on intuition and emotions. Illustrations of financial concepts may improve knowledge but not necessarily behaviors. Same with financial charts and graphs that speak to what Kaneman calls “slow thinking”: a rational and analytic process. At the Visualizing Finance Lab, our primary query is whether intuitive, metaphor-rich, and emotionally engaging visual storytelling can help individuals improve their money behaviors.
VV For your students, was this class a life-changing experience? Did it help them develop empathy for the character in the comic strip, for example? Did it dispel their perception that poor people are poor because they are lazy?
CO Some students, yes—but not all. You have to realize that they are undergraduates in a design and management business program. This class was not an elective; rather it was one of many possibilities for them to choose from a list of “special topics.” This is still an experimental offering in the Parsons catalogue.
VV How does this course fit in the big picture of design education?
CO An important part of this research has to do with increasing empathy for end users by acquiring a better understanding of their reality. That’s always a big issue in design education overall—and our course is just one more aspect of it. It’s about educating and training students to see someone else’s point of view and life situation. It’s part of the codesign and human-centered design trend.
VV You have been doing this for a long time?
CO Aaron, Jennifer, and I started the Visualizing Finance Lab in response to the financial crisis of 2008. At the time we were only interested in how the crisis was presented visually. But the longer we are working with this, the more our interest is shifting toward activism—the importance of increasing the minimum wage, for instance.
Looking at the stories of very poor people who develop and use incredibly sophisticated financial mechanisms was really an eye opener for me.
The emphasis on financial literacy education often deflects attention from underlying problems such as low wages, income and wealth gaps, and inadequate social services. The narrative visualizations that we produce and examine can highlight those problems while, at the same time, modeling healthy financial behaviors. Thus the political engagement is quite subtle, but may help students and others empathize with financially disadvantaged workers. We hope that it can lead to more direct appreciation of what’s at stake, and a more realistic evaluation of the underlying problems.
What motivates me is giving our undergraduates a better way to understand the plight of poor people. I would hope that, as a result of this course, our Parsons students might be more likely to engage politically to fight poverty.
[1] Fry, A., J. Wilson, and C. Overby. 2013. “Teaching the Design of Narrative Visualization for Financial Literacy.” Art Design & Communication in Higher Education 12, no. 2: 157–75. Fry, A., J. Wilson, and C. Overby. 2014. “Designing Financial Literacy with the Other 90%.” In Proceedings from Cumulus Johannesburg Design with the Other 90%: Changing the World. Johannesburg, South Africa: Greenside Design Center.
[2] Anamaria Lusardi, founder and academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center, is notable for her work in this area. Among her many publications is Lusardi, A., and O. S. Mitchell. 2011. “Financial Literacy around the World: An Overview.” Journal of Pension Economics and Finance 10, no. 4: 497–508.
[3] Collins, Daryl, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. 2009. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[4] Tirado, L. 2014. Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. New York: Penguin; also, Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.
[5] Kirsten Bonde Sorensen, PhD, assistant professor of strategic design, University College Lillebaelf, Odense, Denmark.
[6] Daniel Kahneman, psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work in behavioral economics. Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin.