THE FLOW TOWARDS EUROPE
INTERACTIVE VISUALISATION, 2015
JUHO OJALA AND VILLE SAARINEN (FI)
Europe is currently experiencing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Massive numbers are thrown about in the media on a daily basis. But what does half a million asylum seekers really look like? The goal of this project is to convey the magnitude of the crisis in a way that is intuitive, memorable and engaging. The artists use public data from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
This project started with a hunch that visualising each refugee as one moving dot on a map could be a powerful way to convey the magnitude of the crisis. After building a quick proof-of-concept, the artists recognised that such a visualisation does not only show the scale of the numbers, but also beautifully tells the story of what those numbers mean. The core of the project is an open source interactive map that shows asylum applicants arriving in European countries — one that lets the viewer observe change over time, and dig deeper into the places and moments that surprise them. The project scales up or down depending on the viewer’s context: to a simplified interactive map on mobile devices, a video when interaction is unnecessary, or still images when only a snapshot is needed.
BIO:
Juho Ojala is a systems thinker fascinated by communication and curious about dangerous ideas. Juho works at Lucify, a Finnish company trying to foster collaboration on interactive data visualisation for journalism. Ville Saarinen has a background in building software and communication, and is interested in the combination of sociology and technology. Ville is currently part of the Sharetribe team, who are building an open source online marketplace platform. The idea for this project was born during a lunch discussion between Ville and Juho at a data visualisation seminar.