The Refugee Project

Millions of people are displaced from their home due to war, persecution, or violence every year. Explore the causes of the world’s largest forced migrations over the last half century.

Service

Capabilities

Dark background with thin lines connecting circles. The text "THE REFUGEE PROJECT" is centered and gradient-colored from orange to blue underneath a horizontal line of the same gradient.

The challenge

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) works with 35 million displaced people in 126 countries. Their 8,000 person staff collects enormous amounts of data on refugee displacements, and publishes it publicly. However, the organization has struggled to find meaningful ways to communicate and visualize their data and reveal the stories behind the numbers. Faced with these challenges, the UNHCR invited Hyperakt to Geneva to lead workshops, presentations, and discussions on data visualization.

Refugee Project

Our approach

Inspired by UNHCR’s work, Hyperakt took on the challenge of creating a powerful design-driven narrative from 40 years of their refugee data. Working with technologist Ekene Ijeoma, we created an interactive experience that illuminates where and when refugees emigrate, as well as the complex stories of political, social and economic turmoil behind each displacement. By adding historical context to the shifting patterns of forced migration, we highlight the impact each crisis has on people’s lives.

“People who flee across international borders seeking asylum (and, thus, refugee status) leave their homes and lives behind. The Refugee Project synthesizes data gathered by the United Nations to visually narrate the forced migrations of refugees around the world since 1975.”

Paola Antonelli

Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art

Experimenting with prototypes

When we began this collaboration with Ekene, we had 150,232 rows of refugee migration data starting from 1975. The data provided the total number of refugees seeking asylum in each country and, conversely, the number of refugees originating from each country in any given year. From this raw data, we worked together to create a beta application to test different ways to map patterns in the data. The process required a lot of trial and error to make sure we were creating an experience that invited exploration rather than one that overwhelmed and added to confusion.

A blurred background displaying a table with multiple columns of demographic or statistical data. The foreground features a scatterplot matrix consisting of red line graphs comparing various datasets. The viewer window displays list boxes each labeled with different countries.

Highlighting the essential

Working iteratively, we created an interface that provided a global overview of refugee migrations and highlighted key information. We kept the UI simple, composed of three variables: a world map, an information dashboard and a bar chart timeline, and headlines linking to stories for each year.

Red circles centered on each country visualize the total number of refugees originating from that country in each given year. These circles grow and shrink over time as conflict begins and subsides.

A digital infographic titled "The Refugee Project" focuses on the Syrian refugee crisis in 2016. It displays the total population of Syria as 17,465,575 with 5,523,381 refugees. Bar charts show asylum countries, with Turkey hosting the most refugees.

Understanding the data

The UNHCR's numbers only show the total number of refugees each year, rather than those who fled in that particular year. This means that some seemingly stable countries might show large numbers of refugees years after the events that prompted their flight, as these populations are still living as refugees in asylum countries. Shrinking numbers year over year can be attributed to a number of factors including, refugees returning to their home country, refugee deaths, or refugee naturalization in asylum countries.

Three smartphone screens display "The Refugee Project" with maps and data on refugee populations from 2020. Origin and asylum country data are shown on separate screens, highlighting refugee counts, origins, destinations, and a historical contextual blurb about Turkey.

Country of origin vs. country of asylum

Toggling the Origin/Destination button on the information dashboard switches the display between origin mode (red circles) and asylum mode (blue circles). The data shifts correspondingly from reflecting the origin countries of refugees to the countries where refugees have sought asylum.

“As shown clearly by the graphics of The Refugee Project and contrary to popular belief, most of the world’s refugees flee to neighboring countries and stay in the region.”

António Guterres

High Commissioner, UNHCR

Tracing migration paths

Radiating lines between countries show where refugees have sought asylum. We color-coded each line to reflect the direction of movement. For example, the movement of 3 Zimbabwean refugees to the UK in 1990 is depicted with a line between the two countries that is red at the African end and blue at the other.

Why is someone forced to flee?

Each wave of refugees reflects a wave of oppression, violence or chaos in their home countries. We researched and wrote 83 original stories to explain the political and social context behind major refugee movements. We wrote one or more headlines for each year, highlighting some of the key world events in that year impacting refugee crises. Stories are linked between related crises in neighboring countries or between years in a single country to provide a more complete picture of history.

A webpage titled "Recep Tayyip Erdogan Elected Prime Minister" elaborates on Turkey's refugee history, particularly emphasizing the significant number of Kurdish refugees and recent Syrian refugees in Turkey. The left sidebar shows the origin country as 2002 Turkey with 2,981 refugees. Sources listed at the bottom.

“Taken alone, this data could be easily forgotten or ignored. But when it’s made visible by the map’s clean, intelligently designed graphics, the story it tells is shocking.”

Communication Arts

Impact

The Refugee Project has accrued over 15 million page views since launching in January 2014, most of which originated at universities and high schools. It has been shared on Twitter to millions of viewers by global humanitarian organizations like UNHCR, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, UN Global Pulse and Amnesty International.

15M
Pageviews since launch
27
Pages per session
7:20
Average time on site

Museums and galleries in New York, London, Los Angeles, Istanbul, and Hamburg have featured The Refugee Project. MoMA featured the project in its Design & Violence digital exhibition and accompanying book curated by Paola Antonelli. The DesignMuseum London featured in its 2014 Designs of the Year. It was featured at the Istanbul Design Biennial and at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. In 2021, it was featured at the Museum Für Kunst Und Gewerbe Hamburg.

In 2014, The Refugee Project was awarded a prestigious Malofiej International Infographic Awards Silver Medal in a competition dominated by journalism giants like the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian. The same year it received a Gold Medal in the Interactive category at the Information Is Beautiful Awards organized by David McCandless.

“The resulting data visualizations illustrate a tangled network of departures and arrivals, linking some to specific conflicts or environmental catastrophes. The overall impression is one of a worldwide phenomenon, not limited to the handful of countries that have been in the news recently.”

Matt Stromberg

Hyperallergic