Assignment 1 Concept

The concept for this idea came from the milestone 1889 Social Mapping by Charles Booth.

Charles Booth had created street maps of London, showing the poverty and wealth by color coding.

I had also planned to do the same by including a world map. This would show the poverty levels of the entire world, instead of only London. It would be difficult to show a wealth map though. If the gini coefficient of a country is extremely high, there would be a high level of poverty and a high level of wealth as well. As such, I've decided to use a map to only show poverty.

Charles Booth social mapping of poverty in London

At the initial point of time, I could not find a good quality AI format map to mark out the countries of poverty. Most of the maps did not seem to fit the theme or were too low resolution (jpeg format) to use for this infographic. I would have made changes in a later version.

In addition to that, I've also created the timeline to show the level of poverty decline. We've always heard about the decline in poverty, but nothing much about it. We do not exactly know how far have it gone down, or how many people are actually in poverty. As such, I had a map with the data taken from the World Bank to show the levels of poverty.

Again, I am unable to show the levels of wealth because 1) there was no data on wealth, 2) it may be confusing to have 12 lines on a single map.

Nonetheless, the information on the timeline is insufficient to show the differences in the rich and the poor. I made changes (in the facts and figures section) in a later version to show the wealth disparity between the extremely rich, and the extremely poor.

With three types of information (map, timeline, facts and figures), I thought that it would provide the reader with the greatest amount of information, while reducing the cognitive load to understand the infographic due to use of pictograms and colours.