INFORMATION DESIGN
FOR MEGA CITIES ASIA AT THE
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS BOSTON
For their large-scale sculptural exhibition focused on the “Megacities” of Asia, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston asked our information design program to create complementary visualizations to help give context and perspective to these rapidly expanding cities.
We created both a large-scale wall display that shows the population growth over time and a series of labels / scatterplots which were originally intended to accompany each sculpture.
One of the biggest challenges with this project was the incredible difficulty finding consistent / reliable city-level data and reaching consensus on seemingly simple definitions—like "population." In Seoul, population can range from 12 million to around 25 million, depending on which regions are included in the definition.
My partner on this project was Andrew Tang, with help from Dietmar Offenhuber and Kristien Kloeckel.
Super-Natural by Han Seok Hyun
BACK WALL
The idea of the back wall was to address the theme of the exhibition — these rapidly expanding cities — in very direct way. At the same time, we wanted to provide enough detail to allow for some lingering and exploration.
LABELS / SCATTERPLOTS
The original intention was to create a label for each sculpture. From a distance, you would see which city the sculpture was from. And as you got closer, you would see that it was a scatterplot with more detailed information, giving context and insight into some of the themes conveyed in the sculptures as they relate to other cities (waste, density, pollution, infrastructure development, etc.). In the end, the curators decided the scale of the sculptures did not make sense next to these labels, but we salvaged 6 of them and created this wall display. The original 14 labels are below.
