Story Mode

Motivations

The idea behind the stories is to guide the user in our visualisation and help him understand how theses products export development through the years, and in different regions. For the stories, we selected three iconic products, that have a major impact on today's society, either because of their popularity or controversy French Wine, Peruvian Quinoa and Indonesian Palm Oil.

Story Selection

French Wines

France is known for their fine food, but also for their wine. The export of french wine always existed, but since the beginning of the 21th century french wine became more and more popular in Asia. In China, Japan and Singapore, are now part of the top french wine importers.

Peruvian Quinoa

Quinoa is the most popular health food. This grain was consumed by the locals for centuries, but now we can find it in every stores and restaurants. The UN even branded, 2013 the year of Quinoa. The demand rised and the price peaks in 2014, when the price of a kilogram of Quinoa was 7 dollar. The average consumption of Quinoa in Peru fell, and the Guardian accused the "heedless Western hipster" of princing poor Andeans out of their staple food. The price rose was quick and only during one year, this suggests that this turn of events has nothing to do with this.

Indonesian Palm Oil

Palm oil is used in retail food and snack manufacturers as well as in cosmetics and biofuel and energy. The advantages of using this oil seem numerous. For example, the palm plant is about 10 times as productive as a plant like soya bean or rapeseed. Palm oil also have benefits against animal fat because it is cheaper to produce. This product became very popular through the years, we can find palm oil everywhere in a lot of product, one of the most popular being the Nutella. But palm oil doesn't have only advantages. When the demand on Palm oil start rising, with it the deforestation of the Amazonian forest. The expansion of palm oil plantation is alo the main threat to the orangutan survival.

Integrations of the Stories

We integrated the Stories in the navigation bar. The navigation bar is divided in two parts : the stories part and the exploration part.

On the Stories side, we can choose between our three stories. When we select a story, a short introduction about the product appear before the beginning of the story. The user also have the possibility to select a product in exploration mode. In the Exploration mode, we can explorate the data of our three stories, and also the data of other products we studied, like Belgium Beer of Swiss Chocolate.

Story Elements

We have several elements that animate our story.

Roll Year

Roll year is an animation which go through the years of the trades. It animate the timeline, the map and the graph.

Popover

The popovers are windows poping at strategic points of the story to give the user more informations about a specific year, trand or country

Next Button

The user can navigate through the stories using the next button which activate the next chapter of the story. At the end of the story, a next story button appears to go to the following one. At the end of the last story, a button appears to guide the user into the exploration part of the visualisation.

Screencast

Finally, we created the screencast which can also be found here.