Faculty of Design

Graphic Design

Mika Parial

Babylon

The aim of this thesis is to visualize online ecosystems by demonstrating the complexity of online relationships through the use of graphic design. Babylon is a system that can easily enable an individual to see how their individual self impacts the community and the connections they make, as well as to demonstrate the breadth and intricacy of how language evolves in online communities and takes on a (coded) form to the ‘uninitiated’ that will slowly become decipherable with increased contact with the internet.New New Script meant to serve as communicative forms that represent a picture. I want this to come across as one that does not simply represent phonetic sounds, but can convey other ideas as well, like whole words — though instead of words, I’d like to communicate the complexity of a relationship as well as seeing how these relationships can overlap with one another to visualize relationships that are not necessarily held with the people in our immediate vicinity.Relationships are a type of metaphorical ‘architecture’ in that they build society’s foundation. Our day-to-day human interactions can be tracked quite efficiently over the medium of the internet, and even websites now have a way to track and view all interactions with the kind of content you make and put out.The visualization of human relationships, especially ones that don’t have a stable ‘physical’ form that we can comprehend like offline relationships, is something that’s interesting to me, and particularly pertinent given our current situation. As I am creating this thesis in the middle of the 2020 pandemic now, more than ever, relationships that have existed offline have been forced into online spaces.

“Babylon is an application about connecting with others and seeing those relationships, visually manifesting our links with others and reminding us that all relationships (either online or offline) have some weight to them. ”