Project Overview

2022 Spring

Information Design
Visualization
System Thinking

To produce a highly resolved piece of information design, I went through the process of conducting research, developing narrative and informational content, and generating multiple, different visual concepts through a rigorous/iterative sketching process.

The Topic

Evolution of Family Planning propaganda in China

I’m interested in family planning policy in China because one, me not having any siblings is a result of the One-child policy, and secondly as I grow older, I become increasing concern about how I could take care of my parents in the future. When my grandma was ill My mom and her other two other siblings took turn to take care of my grandmother, and when she passed away, they could share the grief and still support each other mentally, and seeing this happen constantly makes me scared and worried about my family’s situation when I get to my parents age. So I wanted to get a more holistic understanding of the family planning police’s impact and be prepared of the risks and opportunities in the future.

Who are my audience?

Parents, young couples

Policy Makers

Foreign Audience

Elderly

︎︎︎what might they care about?

Childcare, Education

Policy, Political Environment

Cultural Mindset, History

Elderly Care, Reflection

My Initial Research

What I found from the initial research:

Through my research, I learnt how the One-child policy leads to declining workforce market, gender imbalance, and the rising needs for healthcare services. Also I learned other factors that leads to increasing aging population such as the cost of raising children and housing and education cost. Also the change in family social dynamic and culture are very intriguing.

Questions I asked myself:

What's unique about China?
Aging population & decling birth rate is a global trend.

What's the cultural mindset is obvious to people in China but might not be clear to the audience.
How to measure influence?
The problem is incrdibly complex. The connection between cause & effect is ambiguous. I chose Show & Tell.

How to balance subjectivity and objectivity?
When approaching a controversial topic, I tried to maintain a neutral voice and tone by consulting multiple perspectives.

Explorations

These are some initial sketches I made. I think my final poster is a mixture of all of them, but especially more align to the second one. I continued exploring what kind of data I could show.

Categories of Information

As for the approaches, I chose to use Measure and Explain.

For Measure, I will be using Total Fertility Rate, which is a major determinant of population growth rate. TFR is the average number of children women would bear, if they survive to the end of reproductive life and have the same probability of child-bearing in each age interval as currently prevails across the population.

For the Explain side, I want to show the historical and political background along with a timeline of when and how the decisions relating to family planning policy.

Organizing Information

I started organizing my research on an Excel sheet to create a timeline of history from 1946 to 2022.

Progression of Iterations

In the first draft, I played around with compositions and ways of displaying data. The horizontal one shows relative change in fertility rate whereas the vertical one shows absolute change.

In the second round of iterations, I explored different fonts, text size, colors, graphics, texture, and placements. One thing I struggled with was building a smooth visual hiearchy that naturally lead the audience to look at different sections of my poster. The black solid shape I had in the first one stood out to much, so I attempted to make it less visually dominant by dissecting the graph into blocks or dots.

As I finalized the vertical poster, I feel restricted by the composition and the structure. Although it is very organized, it also limited the ways I can arrange elements. Therefore, I looked back on horizontal composition I made eariler, and carried on exploring how might it turned out with a different layout.

I also paid more attention to the treatment of the image assets to blend them better into the background.

Final Poster

Here is the final piece I designed. Compare to the last iterations, I added more data visualizations and improved the visual system. For example, all the numbers in the event descriptions are red to help audience make connections easily.

Closing Thoughts:

Through this project, I learned more deeply about the curation process of information design, which seemed like a black box to me in the past. Another thing I really appreciated is how being the designer of an infographic piece lend me the agency to present wicked problem in an ethical and responsible way. Before I started diving into the topic of family planning policies in China, I hold a similar attitude as most western media that I believed this is purly a product of the communist party' ignorance and unbalanced political power. However, knowing that my work should be informative and unbiased pushes me to adopt different perspectives and form a more holistic understanding.