Henry’s Nucle-Os
This project's requirements involved reading the acceptance speech from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, identifying a tension or continuum in their narrative, and drilling deeper using data. I chose the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
The final story describes the agricultural implications of a potential nuclear conflict in terms of calories, both the amount that crops might produce and the amount that we might consume under different conditions. It is up to the reader to discover the data for themself by completing the activities on the back of the cereal box: the lines that they draw will themselves become additional dimensions to the visualization. By translating the data to this more inviting format, the reader must grapple with the prospect of a food-scarce future while eating their first meal of the day.
The corn maze and word search simplify charts from a research paper predicting how atmospheric soot injections from nuclear conflict might affect everyday life. The real numbers are found on the Nutrition Facts label on the side of the box.
