Choices
Illustrating the awful choices faced by Sub-Saharan African farmers in extreme heat
My Role
Concepting, Design Strategy, Visual Design
Team
Periscopic
Year
2024
Project
This project highlights the difficult decisions faced by agricultural farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa as they contend with increasingly extreme heat due to climate change. It sheds light on the harsh realities of working in such conditions, where each choice has significant consequences for both livelihoods and health. Visit the full project here.
My Contributions
For this internal Periscopic project, I played a key role in developing the concept and deciding how to effectively use the data so it resonated with the project's message. I focused on designing interactive elements and shaping the visual design while closely collaborating with our data team.
The project aims to build empathy and capture the overwhelming reality of farmers forced to choose between working in unsafe heat or facing the consequences of not working.
Stirring Empathy Through Simplicity
Inspired by our work on agricultural adaptation in Africa and a desire to experiment with Observable’s new Framework tool, we set out to create a project that goes beyond traditional data analysis, but to build empathy.
The visual design was intentionally kept simple, mirroring the stark choices faced by agricultural workers—both leading to negative outcomes. After each decision, squares accumulate on the screen, visually representing how each seemingly small choice builds into larger, more daunting consequences over time.
