“A Fake Life” is a project developed in 2020 during the Information Design Studio at Aalto University. It aims to investigate how a piece of fake news generate, grow and spread, using data visualization and visual design as communication media.
The project contents refer to a preliminary data collection that included both desktop research and user-centred research. The desktop data collection, parsing, and processing were carried applying the notions learned in two intensive courses, “Data Now” and “Programming for Information Designers”. The user-centred research insights come from a workshop and a journal about news consumption habits that participants were asked to keep for a week.
The final outcome is the prototype of an illustrated interactive visual storytelling where the fake news is personified as a human being going through different stages of life. To unveil the metaphors, users interact by clicking on different parts of the story and opening different visualisations (pop-up cards). Longforms and scrollytelling are narrative forms increasingly used in journalism and data journalism to present complex issues in an immediate, simple way, reducing the bulk of text and visualising information through charts and other visual elements, such as illustrations. In “A Fake Life”, each page scroll corresponds to one stage of life: childhood (how fake news is born), Adolescence (how it grows), Adulthood (how it spreads and “reproduce”), death (how it ends and what are the consequences).
