BACKGROUND

A Black Travel Movement began in 2015 when a growing number of social media and branded communities were created to address the unique desires of Black travelers, who were largely being ignored even as their economic value increased from $49 billion (2010) to $109 billion (2019).

Black & Abroad was one of these trailblazing communities and grew into a multi-platform travel and lifestyle company, providing curated experiences catering to the Black community with tours focused on African, European, and South American destinations.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 led to a collapse in the travel industry. In 2022, as travel opened back up, Black & Abroad wanted to re-ignite conversation about Black travel and yearned to develop a follow-up to their globally recognized “Go Back to Africa” campaign with something equally as provocative. With Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic (McKinsey), we saw an opportunity to turn our attention to domestic travel and support Black-owned businesses at home.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE

“Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users. These decisions can have far-reaching consequences.” — “How Black cartographers put racism on the map of America” by Alderman & Inwood

As we began to explore how to tell a domestic story for Black & Abroad, we started with the idea of creating a map utility that would feature Black-owned businesses, which would be relatively straightforward to build. But through our discovery, we recognized a disturbing cultural truth about maps that would shape how we approached the project.

From redlining to modern urban planning, maps have been used to marginalize, divide, and oppress Black communities across the United States and around the world. We decided to create a wayfinding experience that would bias the data in the Black community’s favor, one that would sit on the historical continuum of counter-mapping to illuminate the heights of Black culture.

THE BLACK ELEVATION MAP

The Black Elevation Map is an uplifting domestic travel utility that visualizes Black cultural data as elevation. The greater the density of data, the higher the elevation. Through the Map, Black & Abroad has created a tool to see and navigate the U.S. in a way that centers on both Black users and the country’s Blackness. In this way, it is transparent and purposeful about its bias.

DATA VISUALIZATION

At the center of the experience is a visualization of +330,000,000 points of data which reveals insights about population distribution and where Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions are likely to be present, absent, and in what abundance.

SCALE

+330,000,000 points of data

+28,000 Black-owned businesses

+6,600 cultural sites

+100 guides with a CMS built for ongoing administration

TOUCHPOINTS

BlackElevationMap.com

“A Hymn Away From Home” launch film

27 individual business mini-documentaries

Geo-targeted, signal-triggered digital media

CURATED CONTENT

Users can explore the map through 12 curated city guides and 10 national guides, which contain dozens of original content models, such as Black-owned wineries (“Melanin Vines”) and restaurants that fueled civil rights (“Civil Bites”).