Why doing this?

We live in a world where most of us do not have clear path to engages complex political issues, because authorities are trying their best to make them as fussy as possible. War and politics have always been entwined, and it is often waged, covered or decorated by media and governors. I intend to help people engage it in a meaningful way.

Process

Data of different wars is collected through different sources. Data points such as timespan, total death, and cost of the war are used as parameters on the object. Five of them were selected.

General data of US involved wars (Source: Wikipedia, WSJ, National Archives)

Form of the bullet is taken to represent the war data because of their high relevancy. I then connect different parameters of the bullet shape to the data point of the wars in a meaningful way.

Connecting data to form

A grasshopper definition was created to pull data directly from data sheep, and transform it into 3D forms.

Grasshopper definition

3D forms are outputted and rendered automaticly.

Final output

Forms to insights

Not cold numbers anymore, these forms has given us a different viewpoint to look at wars. The different forms reflect the different context of the war.

In some way, these forms also resembles real-world weapons and their working mechanism. (e.g. the shape of Korean War bullet is very efficient compare to others, which reminds us its "efficiency" in creating death)