Omid Memorial
About the CSO
The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) is a non-governmental non-profit organisation based in Washington DC. ABC believes that promoting human rights awareness through education and information is a prerequisite for establishing a stable democracy in Iran.
A look at the data
ABC focuses on the right to life and the right to due process. Their representatives brought data on juvenile executions in Iran to Data4Change London 2014. These children form a subsection of Boroumand's "Omid" (meaning 'hope' in Persian) database.
Results
The project built during the workshop is an interactive narrative that includes statistics on juvenile executions in Iran, and audio-visual material from the juvenile offenders.
Intro screen
The research and design team matched with ABC decided right from the outset to focus on the stories behind the statistics. These images are from prototyping screens for a proposed web interactive featuring 113 juvenile offenders who were sentenced to execution in Iran.
Building empathy
ABC had translated letters and statements from many of the juvenile offenders in their database. After learning on the previous screen that the youngest offender to be sentenced to execution was 12, these vignettes serve to humanise the subjects and build emotional connection.
Contextualising the data
Moving further into the prototype we now see a proposed screen that includes an image of the juvenile offender, an audio file of them speaking, and their position on a timeline. This interactive visualisation shows the date of sentencing, and the date of execution.
Many of Iran's juvenile offenders languish in prison for years before their sentence is carried out. The visualisation also serves to show the 'busy years', where multiple juvenile offenders are sentenced to death.
Further exploration of this idea could include overlays showing presidential terms, which could provide insight into the constantly shifting political climate in Iran.
