Reading the Pandemic: Designing People vs. the Coronavirus
You’re likely unfamiliar with the spherical viral particles that are the Coronavirus even though, in the span of 18 months, its siblings and cousins have killed almost 3 million people world-wide. But the spikey-ball “beauty shot”, illustrated to bring COVID-19 to the public’s attention, has now become nearly ubiquitous.
When engaging with a design — whether as a designer or a consumer of design — we need to question the choices that were made in its creation. In the case of COVID-19, the microscope version of the virus is small, blue, and round. It suggests water droplets or candy. In contrast, the “beauty shot” is a huge ball of spiky red prongs, signalling attack and danger.
Looking at a cross-section of advertisements, icons, information graphics, and stock illustrations that have emerged since the Eckert and Higgins illustration, we can see a certain persona — an identity — emerge from the designers’ choices. We can see that COVID-19 isn’t a loner. It usually appears as part of a group (community, gang, army). It can move and doesn’t respect personal space.
COVID-19 is larger-than-life; it’s an alien invader.
COVID-19 is an invisible danger—a faceless, merciless killer.
Except when he isn’t. Then, he is a jerk, an asshole, a party crasher.
These representations of the virus are a form of metaphor called personification where inanimate objects are given recognizable human behaviours and emotions. Non-human entities are treated or spoken of as if they were human. This is a popular and powerful design device. It helps us emotionally connect with abstractions, giving them an immediacy, a form of realness and presence — an “existence”.
While the virus is represented as an agent of impact, the individuals who have been impacted by its agency are, in contrast, most often represented as aggregates. People become counts: of the infected, the tested, the recovered, and the dead.
Counts line-up in columns and rows, eventually becoming graphs made up of circles or lines, or maps overlaid with colour. But what’s really embedded in these displays are thousands or millions of impacted, individual lives.
The virus personified appears to have human attributes—hate, vengeance, ignorance, selfishness, or greed; while the designs that report human cases are abstractions of colour, form, and detail. These abstractions don’t convey the data’s “humanity”. By creating symbols with no natural connection between the object and its graphical representation, we remove the emotional and physical link between us and the human beings that make up our data set.
Undoubtedly, aggregates are powerful tools—they help us convey a lot of information in a limited space and provide a bird’s-eye-view on our data. So far, they are the only ways we have to display information about millions of people. But, in either case, the choices we make as designers—to abstract or personify—are meaningful. They must be considered within the context of impact and consequence, both immediate and long-term.
Milena Radzikowska is a Professor of Information Design at Mount Royal University. She can be found @DrRadzikowska on Twitter and is also one half of Two Hot Soups Design Consulting based in Calgary, Alberta.
- This reading is based on a limited data set, as appears in popular online sources, and does not claim to represent every graphical instance of either COVID-19 or the world-wide impact of the virus.
