Credit Crisis Part 2

Summary
TL Dumpling(Tsoi Chan) and myself(Mark Lester/Phoenix Grayman) decided to revisit the Credit crisis and visualize the ideas in a different manner. In the first project we visualized the crisis as a finite state machine. The type of design allows us to tell a story about how it got start and how it transitioned to each state until the kaboom. This time around we decided to show the crisis as a petri net. We wanted to show the crisis an equation where once all the "variables" were accounted for a recession was bound to take place.

Motivation and Interaction
Denotation
The Credit Crisis is defined in the project in several ways. The most obvious is the visual layout of the section of the economy we modeled that played the biggest role in the melt down. The models were used in the previous project because the scripting for this one was much more intensive. In project 3 we just highlighted parts that were effected in each transition of the state machine. This time around the project will take the user through an equation step by step. We decided to make the equation move forward on the ticks of time. There are 30 ticks in all.

1. Federal Reserve gives credit to banks 1/3
2. 2/3
3. 3/3
4. Bank buys mortgages with credit 1/4 (Prime)
5. 2/4 (Sub Prime)
6. 3/4(Sub Prime)
7. 4/4 (Sub Prime)
8. Box AAA of Collateral Debt Obligations receives first set of payments (least risky)
9. Box BBB gets filled
10. Box Unrated gets filled
11. The investor receive payments from the CDOs 1/3
12. 2/3
13. 3/3
14. Investors pay Bank for the CDOs 1/3
15. 2/3
16. 3/3
17. Sub Primes Default and stops paying 1/3
18. 2/3
19. 3/3
20. Prime Mortgage owners walks away from his mortgage
21. Box Unrated no longer making money
22. Box BBB no longer making money
23. Box AAA no longer making money
24. Investors no longer make money cause CDOs are worthless 1/3
25. 2/3
26. 3/3
27. Investors won't buy anymore CDOs from Bank 1/3
28. 2/3
29. 3/3
30. Bank no longer making money and in major debt goes Bankrupt
    

Connotation
There are various connotations involved in the project as well. For starters we used the same theme from last project. This was done intentionally to not only promote the connotations from last time but also instill the user with a sense of familiarity with our projects. We also showed the the money as a flow of arrows. This helps convey the point of where the money goes is where the attention goes. So we wanted the arrows to be a way to follow where the money was going throughout the equation. We went with red to mean money is gone and green to mean flowing money.
Video