Design Idea
Reflect on the data feminism that I read on weel12, I‘ve been keeping questioning about the general public’s feedback/opinion that current society gives toward the existing issues about racism, and gender racism. However, following with delve thinking, I became more convinced that the goal of true democracy and equality for all has not yet been achieved. Unfortunately, 2020 is a year full of sadness. In this year, we have experienced too much misfortune. However, people’s true self, the real personalities are more easily to be exposed under this troubled time. To some degree, this year reveals the more dark side of human nature. Racial crimination ( ex.: the death of George Floyd, COVID-19 being called “Kungflu”) and gender issues(ex.: Jeffrey Epstein ) are the two topics that I’ve been followed. From there, I started to think, what leads us to this end? Why the world is still a mess even it is already been through with the attack by nature? Thus, I thought about the U.S election that just passed a month ago. According to social media, I knew that the number of voters in the 2020 U.S. presidential election is around 150 million, the highest turnout rate in 112years. Why suddenly so many people vote? The key reason I assume is they are not satisfied with the government, with how they been treated, with the way how the government deals with the pandemic… Based on these thoughts, I decided to visualize President Donald Trump's quote in the past (since the president's way of talking and behaving are also controversial).
Design Process
When doing this project, I keep reflecting on this poster. This is a poster that I made for Major Studio. The poster shows some world events that happed in 2020 so far. I want to connect some data that can make the audience think over this year (also as a piece of memory for me). Thus, I started to look at those data to get inspiration. At the very beginning, I tried to use the geological map to visualized the crim incidents that happed in the United State and map it with race population distribution.
After hearing feedback from classmates during the cc lab class, I realized my idea might be hard to implement since it requires a lot of data, and the datasets are also hard to match (also by knowing lots of students trying to use geo-map represent something). Thus, I decided to visualized something else. By browsing on the internet, I saw the API website called Tronald Drump. The website seems to archive lots of quotes made by the president. By connecting with my previous idea, I decided to connect to this API and made a fun but sarcastic project.
Reflection
Overall, my idea is to visualize the public comments that the U.S president made in the past to reflect on the contradictory side of data feminism. Some of the quotes might aggressive, even opposite with the topics mentioned in data feminism. Once the audience sees the different sides of the theory, the audience might feel the absurdity (at least this is how I feel).
While we are constantly being instilled in moral correctness and social conscience, many people choose not to do it for various reasons. Even the leaders of the country can arbitrarily issue accusations, judgments, and even discriminations when they make their speeches without taking into account the public’s antipathy. Is this so-called freedom of speech? The implication is that in this era of information explosion, I think that public figures need to regulate their words and deeds in order to establish a good moral model for the general public.
Also as the last assignment, this project makes me think about the overall learning experiences with p5.js via the class critical computation. After doing the ten projects, I realized, sometimes a good design or a design that attracts the audiences not always about use advanced algorithms but it is about how to convey the design concept. A lot of time this semester I've struggled with is how to make the project aesthetic, fun, and meaningful. Through our experiment with the ten projects, I think I got a sense of how to balance the coding algorithm with the final outlook of the projects. I have really enjoyed learning how to visualize the code. I believe I will keep practicing in the future:)