Few weeks ago we had a chance to do a collaborative project to answer the brief from Design Council. We could choose one from 3 briefs that they sent us. I chose Brief 03 since the beginning even though my peers and lecturer found as the most challenging one because there is no concrete topic and expectation about the outcome and it involves speculative design theory, which were new to us. I intrigued to learn more about this unconventional concept and wanted to challenge myself. I worked collaboratively with two of my peers, Tatiana Dunenko and Martyna Glock.
About the brief: Examine the current framework for systemic design as a starting point and re- imagine that as a visualisation, or a tool for visualisation which surfaces, exhibits, or facilitates exploration of, the role of one or more, of these activities: Alternative Intent, Collective designand Imagination & possibility. The outcome expected to be beyond conventional visualisations.
These are the process:
I found that deciding the topic and lens for this project took more timeThis is the draft from our first reviewAfter our first review with Cat Drew from Design Council, we decided to focused on the present time rather than future and concerned more about communityWe tried to go back to the brief because we realised that we might lose some points during the processThe explanation of our workshop’s plan3D model by Tatiana
We did the simulation to make sure the workshop is doable and we could achieve what we’re aiming forThe template of our data visualisation legendThe outcomeHow the exhibition will looks like
In this project, I took the role to find the lens, topic and also the idea for the first outcome about heirloom seeds. I did some visualisation and had the responsibility of making the guidance for delegating design task to my peers, such as deciding the colours or finding design references.
I also adapted the framework of Speculative Design by Dunne and Raby (2013) to represent our team’s framework of this project.
I really enjoyed this project, even though it raised feelings of uncertainty. I am considering taking this practice for my future, since I would like to exploreabout the idea of data visualisation in unconventional way.
This pandemic has made us staying at home most of the time and also learning everything mostly online. In my opinion, there are some advantages of learning online. One of it is I can just join some online workshops easily without leaving my space. I’ve attended some workshops and talks this year and found that ‘Into the Wild’ programme from LCC is quite interesting. So I decided to attend ‘Design Ethics for a (more than) Human World’ hosted also by some students from MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures. This talked gave me more insights about how human create their living space. For example about Julia Watson who teaches urban design at Harvard GSD and Columbia GSAPP. She has spent six years developing her concept for LO–TEK which stands for traditional ecological knowledge. It calls for this industry to adopt some of the principles of indigenous design, many of which are thousands of years old, to help cities around the world to not only mitigate the impact of climate change, but to be resilient for the future.
It’s alive! Children cross the Mawlynnong root bridge in India; these structures feature in Watson’s book Lo-TEK. Photograph: Amos Chapple
Related to the living space, we also discussed about emotional topographies. Topographical memory is widely supported by object location memory, which has a role in maintaining a coherent and meaningful representation of the visual world, as well as in providing a platform from which directional information can be generated (Postma and De Haan, 1996; Gronau et al., 2008; Postma et al., 2008). For example, remembering the position of a landmark implies the capacity to process landmark-identity information (what), landmark-position (where), and the binding of what and where information (Moscovitch et al., 1995).
Some examples of mapping cities and memories.
Based on this emotional topographies, we needed to think and reflect our environment that has the most significant emotional experiences and draw it as a map. For me, my tiny bedroom and my flat are the only place that I could think because I spent most of my time during lockdown in my room. I remember every inch of it. It was also nice to see sketches from everyone because everyone has different perspectives to see their living space.
Some sketches of my living space.
I called it ‘my cave’ because I feel like I live in a small cave because the flat is small and we don’t have communal spaces. I categorised the map based on room and the function. I guess this map is a very personal one because it depicts my personal space. Every rectangle represents foot steps. So you can see, how tiny my bedroom is with just around 3-5 foot steps. Luckily I have big windows that allow me to see the sky and my neighbours from my cave.
I thought it would be fun to develop this sketch into a simple animation to show the foot steps. However, this sketch also inspired my project for a cultural centre in Berlin called Oyoun. I initiated to colour code the floor plan and they were happy with the idea. I used the background based on their brand identity. This maps also based on my memory when I visited their place. I remember how vibrant it was, full of creative people and this is the place to support events for Queer, PoC (people of colours) and Migrants who live in Berlin.
I also tried to create a simple model on blender of my bedroom as my emotional topographies based on what Ian Carr thought us about basic blender. It was not easy because I am still not used to blender. It took me awhile even to complete one simple task and I didn’t manage to render it. However, I always aim to try new materials and would be more than happy to learn blender and use it regularly in the future.
It’s strange that I couldn’t find any Wikipedia either for Transfeminicide or Transphobic Femicide. I also couldn’t find the definition of this term on Merriam-Webster. I guess this word based on the term “Femicide” which according to Merriam-Webster refers to the gender-based murder of a woman or girl by a man and first known used in 1976. So, transfeminicide could also means anti-trans violence, especially against transgender women.
I first encountered to this topic few years ago when I started to take a Voguing class in Berlin. My dance teacher recommended us to watch the movie Paris is Burning, a tragic documentary film about the ball culture in New York city mostly for Afro-American, Latino gay, transgender community. I guess, we knew that transgender as a minority mostly experience discrimination in the society, probably it’s also because how they’ve been represented in the media. Another documenter film on Netflix, Disclosure, follows in-depth look at Hollywood’s depiction transgender people and the impact of their stories on transgender lives and American culture.
For our Unit 2 class with Llwelyn, we could chose a topic to build our own project in p5.js. I knew that I wanted to do a project about gender issue so I started to search for the data set and found an interesting data on Kaggle with the hashtag Queer Women Violence and more specifically transfeminicides. From this dataset, I started to set up the plan of how I wanted to show the data using P5.
The dataset from Kaggle.
I was aware that javascript is not my expertise yet and I still find difficulties to code, so I didn’t want to set a high expectation but just wanted to learn of how I could manage a project from scratch. Since there’s an information about Latitude and Longitude in the dataset, I knew that I am gonna create a project based on maps.
One of my inspiration is Queering The Map website. Because there’s an information about cause of death, so I aimed to include this information and put it in the category. This approach reminds me of my previous project for the Unit 01 to show Black Lives Matter victims.
Queering the Map as my inspiration.
Visual reference for the tone and mood.
I found so many obstacles during the project especially to understand using the function. Realising my limitation, I contacted the digital space at LCC to ask a help from Edmund. He helped me to solve some problems that I encountered. After I compared how different the approach that Llwelyn and Edmund took, I came to realised that we can code with different ways and end up with the same result. However one way could be more efficient than the others.
There are so many categories in the dataset with up to 3 death causes for each victims, so I categorised it by shape and colours. To be honest, I didn’t focus on this because my aim is to focus more on the coding side rather than spending too much time thinking about the dataset.
My initial sketch for the prototype using adobe illustrator.The massive legend. The process to map the point where the violence happened.One of examples of the problem, that the label appeared behind the maps and shapes.This is how my project currently looks.You can find the code here.
We spent few weeks to finish this project, however I didn’t feel that I dedicate my time too much in this project because it was also during the weeks of our first assessment for Unit 01. I realise that my code is not efficient enough because I wrote all the shapes and colours one by one. I’ve asked Llwelyn and Edmund about this but it seemed that we should spend more time to crack this issue. Regarding the dataset, I also questioned if all data represents transfeminicides because I found some causes related to Covid-19. I am sure this data also doesn’t represent all victims around the world because it shows more victims in the US and very little in Africa, for example.
I also think that my code still has some missing points and still far from perfect. I was thinking to generate it with creative coding for the finishing but this would take more time. So at the moment, I feel all right to just be able to do a coding project from scratch which I couldn’t imagine when I first started learning P5.
I just finished the blender’s class with Ian Carr and I really enjoyed it. Blender is great for either making something creative or incorporating data to be 3D objects. However I am still having difficulty in working with blender since it’s my first time. So, for example I wasn’t sure how to give a background and to render the animation. I looked at some youtube tutorials but I guess I am not good in learning from the video so I couldn’t manage it and in the end I edited the background in adobe photoshop and didn’t create an animation. This is the beginning, so it’s not too bad to cheat a bit but I am excited to learn more about blender!
For the basic task, Ian asked us to get some of our personal data from our phone. Since I just started to meditate more regularly, so I wanted to visualise my meditation data through INSIGHT, a great meditation app with a community concept that I could recommend! But this data doesn’t 100% represent my meditation routine because sometime I meditate without the app. However, it’s great to see that I’ve added meditation as my routine now!
I visualised my meditation routine from Friday to Friday.
The graph above shows the time I spent to meditate and the second graph below it shows how many time I meditate a day.
Modelling using a marble texture.
Surprisingly today I meditated more and longer than any other days before!
In terms of blender, I am not fully satisfy with my result but this is a good start to try more and explore my idea using this software. Thanks Ian for teaching us today!
I found mapping on P5 is interesting because I use Google Maps a lot and it’s interesting to know how people build the mapping. This app is so easy to use but in reality, behind that useful app it requires such a complicated coding. Even during the class, I wanted to just mapping my holiday route with my family and it was confusing in the beginning. I created a simple holiday route from London to Brighton, Oxford and last stop was Edinburgh. That was a memorable holiday, the very last holiday with my family before my mom passed away.
The map’s look is quite basic but I am just happy to manage the task, which is just to navigate the route. You can check the code here.
Last family holiday’s route.
Another task was to trace a location using Geo Json. I wanted to trace Indonesia, but first I failed because I guess I downloaded a bad Geo Json file. But after I found an other source, it worked! You can check the code here.
Tracing my country. We have more than 13.000 islands!
Overall, the look is not that interesting and not beautiful at all, but this knowledge is so useful as a based to develop another map’s project. Even the basic look also requires a complexity. So, I won’t underestimate it.
I always trigger to do something with music but never had a chance beside created a piece of demo on garage band long time ago. I just love everything about music and music history! During the p5 class with Llewelyn, we learned how to incorporate music with graphic so it can be interactive. I still created something basic but I am curious to dig more about this topic!
Not a big fan of Andy Warhol, but the history of the factory, the Velvet Underground and those era have fascinated me since I was really young. So, inspired by the the famous piece of his artwork, Flowers (1964), I re-created a flower that responds to the music. The text is based on Warhol’s quote as well.
The original “Flowers” by Andy Warhol.My remake on P5.js.
From my first prototype, I had an idea to also analyse the Black Lives Matter Slogan. I was curious, which slogan had the most search on Wikipedia english in 2020. There have been so many slogans that people wrote on the protest’s sign since 2013 but only few of them are on Wikipedia.
Source: Wikipedia.
I initiated to just create a small chart for the slogan to answer my curiosity but after the tutorial session with my course leader, Henrietta, it seems that it would be a good idea to make another poster for this topic. Through the discussion, she mentioned one name as a reference: Sister Corita Kent, who was an amazing artist! I am a new fan! She created typography posters in pop art style for her concerns about poverty, racism, war, and social justice. I was so fascinated by the story and how she also became an educator and advocate for social justice.
One of the artwork from Sister Corita Kent.
I thought for this poster I would go with more artistic direction and it shouldn’t have to be 100% accurate with the percentage since I just visualised 3 slogans with a very small data. So, the most important thing is that audience can see the ratio’s difference.
My sketch.First sketch to just show my idea at tutorial class.Second prototype.
After my second prototype, considering Henrietta’s feedback, I reconstructed the poster to not be a word cloud.
It was challenging to find the right font type. Even my sketch didn’t help that much because in the end, a digital execution is different than my sketch. It didn’t go well as I planned and I couldn’t get the vibes. It took me so long to just find the right wave for the typography and also to find the right layout was not easy. I was too tired and my brain couldn’t function that well after 7am before the submission time. So I realised that I need to give up and give what I could do. At least, I’ve tried my best.
Why not putting this poster on the street’s wall to raise awareness?
The assessment’s feedback said “The second element with the slogans is engaging, but I think at present they text looks a little too jaunty! – perhaps more angularity to the ‘waves’ might better convey the urgency and the nature of the demands behind these slogans?” which I agree.
So I made a revision after the assessment to also give me more peace in heart to know that I could execute this poster better. I would appreciate to hear what you think of this new version comparing to the final one?
The new version, I made it less wavy, overlap and also changed the typeface to be more condensed.
I never thought that I would create any projects related to Black Lives Matter (BLM). This topic arose when I was still living in Berlin and I remember many of my white friends who never really spoke about racism suddenly got busy preparing to go to the demonstration. Even a white friend who unintentionally did and said racist things to me and denied her privilege also went there. That day, when the big demonstration happened in June 2020 and all people gathered in Alexanderplatz, I just decided to stay at home. My heart hurts and I was questioning, what does this demonstration mean? Are people who go there not racist?
I wouldn’t say that I know a lot about racism and political issues. I guess, my interest about this topic began while I was still living in Jakarta and worked intensely with a NGO called Pamflet, who encourage young people’s participation in politic. After I moved to Berlin, I was so lucky to meet friends from Biwoc Rising who gave me more knowledge about racism issues through discussion. Later, I found out about a term: performative activism, that we could see from the BLM demonstration case I mentioned before. So, for my outcome Unit 1, I aimed to raise more awareness about BLM as a non-performative act and not a trend. I wanted to analyse people’s reaction towards this topic and see their behaviour of responding BLM in 2020.
As stated on the brief that we should use the data either from Tiz’s class about plastic pollution or from Jovan’s statistic class about Wikipedia, at first I was on the fence. This is because I struggle learning statistic and excel. I know that these subjects has been a challenge since I was at school, moreover during the team work, my team couldn’t solve to make the graph when we had to compared big events on Wikipedia. In other hand, I felt stuck about developing plastic pollution data and it’s not something that I am interested in. My fear won and at first I decided to go with plastic pollution data. My idea was to focus on plastic pollution data in Indonesia, which could be interesting. I created the mood board with some ideas, as well as emailed organisations to get more data. I was waiting for few days but no one got back to me. So I guess I should changed my topic since plastic pollution seemed not feasible, also my heart said that that is not what I should do.
That was the time when I had to conquer my fear and listen to my heart. That was the right decision because with working on Wikipedia english data, I could incorporate my thought about BLM and this is something that I am concerned about. I’ve looked at say every name‘s website and thought that it would be a good idea to list the victims and see how people react on Wikipedia after the death of each victims. But there are just view victims’ name there so I searched for more names on cbs news and I input the data manually. However not all names are on Wikipedia, so I decided to focus on victims who are listed there but also not neglecting the other victims. After the discussion with my activist friend, just few names listed on say every name’s website make it looks that there were not so many victims. And people probably ask, why it’s even matter if just view people died because of police brutality?
sayeveryname’s website. I knew about this movement when I was in Berlin, saw a flag with this hashtag.Article from Cbs news. Many victims’ name that I haven’t heard before.
After that, I made some sketches. I was sure that timeline is the best way to visualise it since I wanted to analyse the Wikipedia page views’ pattern every months. I also created a visual metaphor, the circle as a target board to represent the police brutality, but I needed to be careful about representing it since it’s a sensitive topic.
My sketch.Another sketch to also incorporate it with a map.This is a piece of work by Georgia Lupi that heavily inspired me.
To know which victims are on Wikipedia, I had to search the name one by one to find out. When it was the time to work with Wikipedia data on excel, I’ve tried my best to remember what Jovan taught us at class and searched each name so I got the page views’ data from 2020.
We can see the granularity of data here.
However, after a tutorial session with Jovan, I found out that this technique is not that efficient and there’s another way to see the pattern with just having one search engine. So Jovan provided me with one tools so I could load the pattern easily because what I need is now just a total view. My planned was to transfer the data to Raw graph and edit it on Adobe Illustrator.
It seems that it’s not feasible to create the chart as what I planned on my sketch with Raw graph. So, after discussed with Henrietta,I allowed to book another tutorial session with Jovan. Well, yes I love tutorial session! On that session, Jovan taught me how to load data in R Studio to achieved the circle graph that I want. Thanks Jovan!
This is amazing! I need to learn R Studio more. That made my life so much easier. My first prototype.
I think making a prototype is always useful, especially when I showed it to Henrietta and my peers during the tutorial. I got so many feedback that I didn’t thought about before. So after that tutorial, I had a private discussion with my peer Yannan and I learned a lot from him about colours, symbol and how to represent my data beautifully, yet accurately. He’s so detail oriented! Thanks Yannan. I also had many calls with my other peer, Tatiana, to just support each other mentally and to not feeling alone since this pandemic could be a challenging time for all of us.
I applied gender as non-binary. Here you can see as well how we evolve colour stereotypes.
This is one of my first data visualisation projects and I am happy that I could implement what I wrote on my essay about “Representing Gender Identity in Data Visualisation”. As I wrote on my essay, to address this challenge, we, as a data visualisation designer, could influence change and inspired people by giving examples in our work. I hope that I could continue this principle and my peers will also considering to represent gender not just in binary male and female.
I think it’s worthwhile to put data visualisation work in a public space to raise awareness.
I realised that my work is far from perfect and I am willing to learn more of creating a good storytelling, presenting the data elegantly in a meaningful way and also creating an engagement with the audience. Based on the assessment’s feedback, for the next project I would not forget to create the presentation pages with grid, which I didn’t think that it would plays a big role. But it is!
My final topic is about “Representing Gender Identity in Data Visualisation”. I am happy with this decision since gender issue is one of the topics that I am interested in. Being in a queer environment and having many queer, non-binary friends, I triggered to bring up this topic to the surface. There were so many questions arise in my head. Why are we used to count gender in binary, male and female? Why there is a stereotype of gender in colours? Why society creates a stereotype that female should behave in certain ways and vice versa? How can we evolve gender bias? Why trans + non-binary gender are rarely included in most of data visualisation work or data collection?
During the Christmas break, I read Data Feminism book by Klein and D’Ignazio to support my writing. I think this book is a bible for anyone who work or interested in data. I also read Design Justice by Sasha Contanza-Chock and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez but not like Data Feminism, I just read some of chapters that related to my research. Beside that, I also read some paper that I downloaded from google scholars. I think reading is so crucial because apart from the knowledge that I got, I also learned how to write and think in a critical way.
I never wrote any essay in my life moreover in a foreign language, so this Unit 1 essay was a big challenge for me. I realised that it’s okay to ask for helps so the discussion with Mark Baker from the language development class and a language session with Anita Strasser, which I highly recommend, had helped me through the process. Some of my friends also helped me with correcting my english and gave some inputs since the tutorial from UAL was a bit short to discuss for the whole essay. So I am really thankful to my friends, Geoff, Andrew and Linn who generously spent their time to read my essay. When they said that the essay was good and I just made some grammatical mistakes, I was flattered and couldn’t believe it. However, I realised that I need to advance my critical thinking and academic english so I could write in a higher level.
This first writing experience wasn’t easy but I truly enjoyed to write something that I am very interested in. In the future, also considering Henrietta’s input, I might considering to create a zine or maybe a website to discuss more about rethink binaries and create an archive for data visualisation work that include trans + non-binary gender. There are not so many at the moment, but I’ve started it with my own work.
After finished this essay, I never see gender category in the same way anymore. To read it please check out my behance.
Before Christmas holiday, we should proposed an idea for the 1500 words essay. This would be our first assessment so I thought It would be great to write a topic that I am interested in that should also relatable to data visualisation practice. Some topics came into my mind but then I decided to go with “Re-identifying the Image and Power of Asian Womxn Migrants”. I thought this topic is interesting since I feel that most concern about white and black people but neglecting issues about discrimination and racism to other marginal group such as asian womxn migrants. After my first discussion with Henrietta, we agreed that this is not an easy task to find data visualisation work related to this topic, so I gave myself a week to gather the case study and see if it’s feasible. I was optimistic and directly contacted activists friends in Jakarta, Berlin and London and also some POC groups to gain more information about this. From many conversation, I got some information and surprisingly had a very positive feedback. One of the artists from Asia art activism, a collective based in London even reached me out to engage with a conversation and later we became friends. Another information I got was from a private facebook group that I joined since I was in Berlin called DAMN (Asian Germans Makes Noise) which gave me some great names such as Nushin Yazdani and School of Commons. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any data visualisation work related to the topic that I want to address. So after a week, I decided to stop my investigation and move forward to find another topics. This is such a mixed feelings because I already put my thought and vision to write about this topic but I learned that sometimes I have to let go things that I’ve planned rather than making my journey harder in the long run. However, through the conversation with so many people during the process, I also found some great books’ recommendations that inspired me to find a new topic.
Below is one page from bell hooks’ book Feminism is for Everybody (2000). She has become one of my hero and this chapter made me rethink about gender inequality.
Another great feminist figures that I adore is Trinh Minh-Ha. On her book, Woman Native Other (1989), she examines feminism in the world of male domination, issues about being asian woman in a white society and also about gender.
From my first topic’s failed attempt, I realised that beside of racism, gender is a topic that I am concerned about. So I made up my mind to concentrate on this topic. I think there’s no such things as wasting time even if we are not succeed in the end because we will always get something else that could be useful in the future. And knowledge would never be a waste.
