Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection by Jiabao Li Wins the Silver A' Design Award in Website and Web Design

Jiabao Li acknowledged for website and web design by the international grand jury of the 2020 - 2021 A' Design Award & Competition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COMO, Italy, April 23, 2021 /DesignNewswire/ A' Design Award & Competition has announced that Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection by Jiabao Li has been granted the Silver A' Design Award in the Website and Web Design category. The award was conferred within the 2020 - 2021 A' Design Award & Competition and was decided through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who scored anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.

The Silver A' Design Award Explained

The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.

About Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection

Unfinished Farewell is a memorial website created to commemorate people who died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each person is given an individual chamber that visitors can enter. Inside each chamber, visitors can read the story of the deceased and the help-seeking messages posted before the death, and can also leave a message. Messages left by the public float within the space. Portraits scatter and vanish when touched. The particle system is built with three.js and the floating text with p5.js. Information was gathered from families and from public posts.

About Jiabao Li

Working at the intersection of emerging technology, art and design, Jiabao Li creates new ways for humans to perceive the world. She works across nature, humans’ designed environment, and belief structures and creates works addressing climate change, humane technology, and a just, sustainable future. Her mediums include wearable, robot, AR/VR, projection, performance, software, installation. In Jiabao’s TED Talk, she uncovered how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. At Apple, she invents and explores new technologies for future products. She graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Design in Technology with Distinction and best thesis award.

Award Record

Jiabao Li is a winner of 1 A' Design Award, including this recognition.

About the A' Website and Web Design Awards

The A' Web Design Award is an international web design competition recognizing good web designs by leading web designers, coders and developers worldwide. The competition is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to web designers, user interface designers, user experience designers and graphic designers from all countries. Entries typically include web design, portfolios, e-commerce sites, blogs, news websites and social media platforms. Awarded web designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/web

About A' Design Award & Competition

A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade organized annually since 2008. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The A' Design Award has a philanthropic mission to advance society through good design by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously evaluated by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. The A' Design Prize granted to eligible laureates includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, the upload of a work and the preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. Further information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com

Press Resources

Winner Page: https://designers.org/122354
A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/122354
Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!122354
Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/217206
Further Information from the Laureate: http://www.jiabaoli.org/covid19

Media Contact

Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953

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Fact Sheet

The Work

Project: Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection
Function: Immersive Projection
Category: Website and Web Design
Discipline: Communication Design
Industry: Software and Branding & Advertising
Colors: Black, Dark Slate Gray, Dim Gray, Gray and Dark Gray
Images: 5

The Recognition

Laureate: Jiabao Li
Country: United States of America
Recognition: Silver A' Design Award
Edition: 2020 - 2021
Design ID: #122354

Credits

Team: Jiabao Li, Laobai Wu, Sheng Wang, Wenying Wu, Min Zhu, Amo and Lu Wang (dk)
Image Credits: Jiabao Li

Design Details

Unique Properties: Unfinished Farewell is an online space to commemorate the people who have left us because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When visitors enter each person's "tomb", they can see their stories and the help-seeking information they posted before they passed away, and leave a message. There are various ways of visualizing the statistics of COVID, but none about individual’s story. This project provides one way for us to visualize and relate to death. Behind every number is a life.
Inspiration: We designed the website this way so that when visitors enter this space, they can sense that sort of atmosphere: sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, agony. A comparable feeling that visitors can have as if they are physically visiting their tomb. This gives us much more understanding of death than the increasing statistics.
Research: As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and the number of deaths continues to rise, the heartbreaking experiences are being replaced by collective mourning. As German journalist and pacifist Kurt Tukholsky said: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic". When we look back at the help-seeking posts of those lost, those who waited to die because of unconfirmed testing; those whose death certificates were being tampered with; those who committed suicide out of despair; those non-COVID patients whose life-saving medical treatment was foregone… None of them were included in the death toll, and are likely to be forgotten over time.
Challenge: Website design: How to design the space to have a comparable feeling of visiting the physical tomb during a time that everybody has to stay at home. How to convey sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, and agony through a website interface and interactions. Data collection: We collected the data through both algorithms and manually. We reached out to each person's family to gather information and their portraits. It was a very sad and tough communication process. Surveillance: This project has been constantly surveilled by cyber police in China because any artworks related to the pandemic are considered "sensitive" topics.
Realization and Technology: The particle system is written with three.js. The floating message inside each chamber is written with p5.js. We manually collected all the information of the deceased by contacting their families and from Weibo, to have a better understanding of each individual’s story.
Operation and Interaction: Here we try to gather the portrait for each deceased. You’ve never met this person, but their portrait is right in front of you, but then you realized that they’ve passed away. As soon as your finger lingers on the person’s face, it scatters and vanishes. You haven’t have a chance to really get to know this person, they just fade away. I designed the website this way so that when visitors enter this space, they can sense that sort of atmosphere: sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, agony. A comparable feeling that visitors can have as if they are physically visiting their tomb. This gives us much more understanding of death than the increasing statistics.
Project Duration and Location: Duration varies, online
Keywords: COVID-19, commemorate, platform, pandemic, digital tomb