“Language carries culture and embodies beliefs, customs, values and thoughts.”
(Sayedayn, 2021)
Designer Statement and project concept
For this project I wanted to explore complex issues through analysis, visualisation and interaction.
This project is a visual exploration of language similarities across nations through the lens of colonisation. I explored academic datasets as well as creating my own. It uses an interactive LED network under a data visualisation to display the relationships between countries colonised by England, Spain, Portugal and France.
The physical setup displays two graphs: a network graph which showing connections between colonisers and colonised, and a stylised principal component analysis scatter plot demonstrating the linguistic similarities between colonisers and colonised nations.
The user can activate different LEDs to explore how countries were colonised by multiple empires or observe the linguistic proximity of their languages. The user uses the different buttons to explore different areas of the graph and to observe different relationships.
The project offers a way to engage with historical patterns and linguistic data, providing the user with a way to engage with complex data in a more simplistic way. The design is tactile, visually engaging and also educational, sparking reflection on the complexities of colonisation’s legacy on language.
DEsign documentation video
A guide to interaction and legend
Buttons and controls
The visualisation has four buttons. Each button represents a section of the visualisation. To light up and explore different parts of the visualisation press on any of the four buttons. E = England, F = France, P = Portugal, S = Spain
Lighting and colour cues
Throughout the visualisation it uses colour coding as well as lights to indicate what country or group the nodes are related to.
England and all countries colonised by it are red. All the different versions of English and English based creoles and pidgins are also red.
France, Portugal and Spain all follow the same pattern for their respective countries and related languages.
France is blue, Portugal is green and Spain is Orange.
Purple is the other colour used. It represents countries that where colonised by multiple countries within the graph.
Exploring the project
The project is designed to allow users to explore at their own pace and draw their own conclusions from the data through engagement in a visual and interesting way. It allows users to go into in depth exploration, using both graphs to cross reference data, as well as guide on interaction booklet provided during the exhibition.
A note on data
For this project, I used multiple data sources. For the network graph credible academic sources were used to analyse dates, length of time colonised and colonisers. However, for the PCA scatter plot I created my own data set using AI-generated translations of the first chapter of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of the most translated book in the world. While it was incredibly beneficial to be able to use AI for translations it is important to acknowledge that AI models can introduce bias due to limitations in their training data.
Data and Design
This project combines both data analysis and design, two industry’s that are increasingly intertwined, as both rely on extracting meaningful insights from complex information. As someone with a background in engineering studies and in my final year of interaction design, the intersection of these industries is an exciting space to work and design in. I hope that this project leverages both these fields into a cohesive experience that is informative, thought provoking and fun.
A booklet guide for the exhibition
