Uncovering Human Landscapes of Data

Sarah Tabbara

Summary
Final work

With an affinity to create a sense of relatability between people, my creative practice explores ways of uncovering shared human experiences of everyday life by the means of participatory design approaches. Through my work, I invite my audience to become meticulous observers as well as curious participants.

With an affinity to create a sense of relatability between people, my creative practice explores ...

CollegeCentral Saint Martins
CourseBA (Hons) Graphic Communication Design
Graduation year2023

"A Repository of Worries" and "When a Chair becomes a Seat" are an ensemble of work that uncovers underlying emotional and visual human landscapes of data in the CSM Library. At a threshold between participatory design and data visualisation, the projects highlight shared human experiences that evoke a sense of relatability as well as curiosity amongst its participants.

Final work

A Repository of Worries

Everybody worries about something. Worrying is an act of the everyday that people identify with on a personal and human level. While the CSM library can be regarded as a place where students pin a lot of hope on to work, converse, socialise, or even rest... it also becomes a spatial capsule that embodies a record of a shared human experience for those who visit it. This project serves as a visual exploration of what “mapping a worry” could be, revealing the underlying landscape of emotion that lies within this place.

The “Worry Journal” is a tiny book designed to explore what “visual structures” emerge at the intersection between neutral geometries and human intuition. It takes on the form of a functional and simply stylized template which provides the participants with an approachable set of illustration prompts. The latter are specific enough to be a foundation of reference, yet open enough to give the students space for interpretation and creative freedom to express what they’re worried about. Thereby, the journals capture the students’ most intuitive responses to the shapes provided. The project showcases 115 journals filled out by students in the CSM Library. It takes the form of 3 outcomes: A 2-meter-long wooden shelf in which the journals are anchored, an animation that displays the individual pages of each journal, and an “Archives book” that curates the pages of the journals collectively. The ensemble of journals forms a repository of the students’ worries, where the individual journey becomes part of the collective, with every single journal becoming a placeholder of a distinct human expression.

Click here to view the animation :)

When A Chair Becomes A Seat

A map shows an overview of a place. A collection of elements which is generous in the way it conveys spacial information, yet limited in the way it narrates the human stories or experiences of a place. Using the CSM Library floorpans as a main reference, the project aims to explore ways of humanising these maps in order to convey a sample of a visual landscape experienced by its students. The project outcome takes the form of a trilogy of books and a set of three maps. Each book and map compile an ensemble of hand-drawn responses observed by students across different seats for each floor of the Library: Floors 1,2 & 3. With over 250 responses, traces of human encounters bring to the fore the threshold at which an empty chair becomes an occupied seat. The books offer a physical "zoom in" on the maps, which showcase the "Seat" and the "View" in a numbered pair. Consequently, the latter portray a human visualisation of the place that constitutes the CSM Library.

Credits: CSM Library floorplans were provided by the CSM Library, which I took inspiration from to make the series of maps.