dataviz-spill-the-boba

My Role +

Design and Development

Research

Testing

Skills +

End to end Design‍

Creative Coding

JavaScript

Prototyping

Tools +

Figma
JavaScript
Procreate

Time +

Jan. 2021 to May. 2021
(Ongoing)

Best of the year!

Raise awareness of the struggles that immigrants face lifelong for everybody not only Asian immigrants. Project was featured on Sheila C. Johnson Design Center's Windows during summer! Unfortunately, I wasn't been able to return to Parsons campus during that time

Project Explained in Video

→ See it online:

Why Boba Tea?

Over the past 30 years, bubble tea in America has gone from a niche Taiwanese beverage to a mainstream iconic cultural symbol for Asian Americans. Bubble tea (often called Boba among Asian Americans) is an exciting blend of texture and flavor for the palate from Taiwan. It is a milk-based tea with chewy tapioca pearls inside. The word boba has become so widely used in this community socially as a controversial noun in the discussion of defying unique cultural traits for immigrants. This data visualization, which consists of multiple data sources and charts, is intended to explore and visualize the reasons behind the popularity of boba.

Part One: My drinking habits and How does a simple drink become “the boba”

Part Two: Why does boba become popular

2500 drinks from 58 boba tea shops

- Atomize the data from the menu, A dot represents a line The novelty never wears off, boba keeps evolving with new interests which has a lot of room for customization to keep a larger audience.

2560 posts about boba tea of nyc on instagram

boba is definitely a social drink, inviting others to join in the trend to stay connectedLayered matcha milk tea inviting customers to share its unique appealing appearance through social media.

549 tweets talking about boba and identity

-.Boba brings immigrants together during their younger years as they try to find their place in society.

-.On the other hand: boba is too shallow of a measurement of all asian identity, likened to the often ridiculed “boba liberals”: Looks sweet and well-presented, but no real glow, for asian culture traits.

Overall, it's a matter of how people define who they are and who they will be

Boba with its simple ingredients and strong social media presence is a cultural object that is readily adopted by generations of Asian Americans, But at some point in their lives, people graduated from the boba life.

Details:

Just a little bit details of the creating process...

As one of the earliest example of visualizing collections from the Smithsonian Open Access, My work is mentioned on the official websites of Smithsonian and Parsons.

My original design was to scroll through an article like an essay and let the audience understand the development of boba tea in the immigrant community. But I quickly discovered the problem with this through testing: because everyone has a different level of knowledge about boba tea and its cultural connotations, I had to start with the basics of what boba tea is. This would cause some viewers to quickly lose interest as they scrolled alone

"Not quite sure what's my focus on this visualization"

"It is kinda plain with many repetitive information"

Divided into several parts with clear navitgations

Hand drew visual language to mimic the journey of a cup of spilled boba tea

Collect people's memories related to boba to make a cultural boba map with common memories.

This map is different from a food map like yelp, because boba is closely related to the memories of asian immigrants. I want to use the theme of boba tea to remind people within the asian community of the cultural bond and to let others understand the long life story of immigrants adapting, integrating and developing in a strange landInspired by ancient Buddhist scripture scrolls, the mudras (gestures) art pieces are gathered together and synthesized for presentation.