“I thought that the craft on this piece was brilliant and pleasant to look at, despite the complexity of the source data.” —Laurent Thevenet

“I thought the use of projection mapping on newsprint was very smart—it really highlighted how printed data only provides a snapshot of what really goes on in the world.” —Jen Vladimirsky

Overview: To graphically visualize the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yan Yan, student at Pasadena-based ArtCenter College of Design, created a data-driven newspaper reporting on the invasion and Ukraine’s subsequent refugee crisis with a real-time data prototype. The font size visualizes the numbers of people fleeing Ukraine as refugees. Furthermore, the newspaper represents the frequency of words used in other newspapers’ reporting on the invasion with fonts and rectangles of varying sizes creating diagrams.

Yan utilized JavaScript and APIs to collect data from real-time reports in the New York Times.

All data taken from the New York Times was passed into a Processing sketch for visualization. The words within the data were counted, the final numbers of which were translated into rectangle and font-size values.

From concept to completion, Lives in Process took Yan about one month.

Comments by Yan Yan: 
What do you think are the project’s core features? “This project mainly explores globalization and migration in a postcolonial world. It does not propose a solution but instead focuses on reexamining our capacity for compassion and the potential for graphic design to engage social issues that benefit the public good instead of selling more products. It tries to redirect ‘design for good’ projects in more ethical, reciprocal ways. Facing crisis, how can graphic designers create real impact with meaningful social issues? How can designers promote much greater awareness of the global crisis we face? The current Russia-Ukraine War has no doubt made the topic of this thesis project all the more relevant and timely.”

What was your inspiration for this project? “This crisis is not only the staggering number of refugees with nowhere to go but the temptation to turn away in a time that asks something of each of us. The scale of the crisis, as it is right now, can only be fully depicted and understood through statistics and facts. Data can perhaps help our minds and hearts to process these events, offering an alternative to the conditioning and close-mindedness of the mainstream media that serves to desensitize viewers. You don’t watch the installations: you experience them. It provides conversations through graphic design beyond numbers, facts, text, literature or analysis and allows viewers to do more than just flip through a newspaper.

“My hope for this project is that it hits home with those who experience it and shines a fresh light on why solving the refugee crisis matters so much to all of us. This is not a project about refugees’ tragedy but instead a quest for transformation. I hope that can begin here, with people seeing that, as human beings, we’re all part of this.”