Duration: 8 weeks | Fall 2024 | Team: Kai Helms, Laurel Zhang, and Sukanaya Warrior | Programs: Adobe Illustrator + Adobe After Effects
A spherical museum display that traces the evolution of the world’s most spoken languages, showing the impact of history, migration, and cultural exchange.
Problem
Science On a Sphere (SOS) is often used to display environmental datasets like climate patterns or ocean temperatures. While impactful, these datasets don’t always reflect human or cultural stories. Our challenge was to design a new dataset catalog that could expand what SOS communicates and spark curiosity in a different way. We wanted to explore how people, culture, and history shape the world.
Solution
We created Word Wanderers, a dataset that visualizes how the world’s most spoken languages have evolved over the last century. Displayed on the SOS globe, visitors can see languages spread, shrink, and shift across regions over time, influenced by migration, colonization, and cultural exchange. Instead of only reading about these changes, audiences experience them across the Earth itself.
Full Word Wanderers Videos
Opportunities with Data Visualization
Engagement → Expands SOS’s role beyond climate to include cultural stories.
Education → Reveals how history, politics, and migration shape language.
Immersion → Uses the globe to show language as a truly global phenomenon.
Process
We started by researching global language distribution and identifying how languages have changed over time. From there, we shaped the data into a format that could work on the spherical display. We experimented with how to show density, regional spread, and time progression in a way that felt clear when wrapped around a globe. Our final product was an animated sequence that let visitors see language as a living, changing system.
Global perspective
Languages are displayed geographically across the Earth.
Cultural context
Moments tied to migration, colonization, and global events.
Impact
The museum staff loved the project and highlighted how unique it was to take SOS in a new direction. They appreciated the way we thought outside the box and managed to cover such a wide range of data while still making it engaging. The project also went beyond the classroom—it was published in a journal, which reinforced the value and originality of our approach.
Reflection
Designing for a medium like SOS made us think differently about how data is experienced. Instead of flat screens, we had to design for a globe that people would move around in real space. The project showed us how cultural data can spark curiosity and how design can turn raw numbers into an immersive story.
Future Opportunities
If we were to continue this project, we would:
Incorporate audio samples so audiences could hear languages along with the visuals.
Connect to real-time updates to reflect current language trends.
