How might I visualize such a complex identity topic and making it resonate with the public not limited to Asians ?
Boba tea, as simple as a drink can become a rallying focal point for a subset of the Asian immigrant community.
Over the past 30 years, bubble tea in America has gone from a niche Taiwanese beverage to a mainstream iconic cultural symbol for Asian Americans. Bubble tea (often called Boba among Asian Americans) is an exciting blend of texture and flavor for the palate from Taiwan. It is a milk-based tea with chewy tapioca pearls inside. The word boba has become so widely used in this community socially as a controversial noun in the discussion of defying unique cultural traits for immigrants. This data visualization, which consists of multiple data sources and charts, is intended to explore and visualize the reasons behind the popularity of boba.
Impact of project: Project been selected to participate the Parsons Festival!
Project Explain in Video
Recently the resurgence of explicit, often violent racism towards Asian Americans has triggered people to look beyond the framework of their own growth and interpret their "Asian-ness" objectively from the outside. I want to explore Asian Identity from the familiar things around the community and give a voice to the Asian American group.
The word boba has become so widely used in this community socially. Asian immigrants hang out at boba tea shops and joke that “How Asian are you if you don’t like boba?” It brings them together and gives them something that constitutes a commonly shared experience
My boba aria during covid
- For the past year, my roommate, an Asian American, and I, ordered 100 cups of boba. Drinks in hand, We joked about our common strict asian parents, lactose intolerance and what to order next time.
Boba from Taiwan to the States
- Born in Taiwan in the 1980s Boba tea began its journey with immigrants, First seen in Los A before taking the country by storm,
Customizable
2500 drinks from 58 boba tea shops
- Atomize the data from the menu, A dot represents a line The novelty never wears off, boba keeps evolving with new interests which has a lot of room for customization to keep a larger audience.
Instagramable
2560 posts about boba tea of nyc on instagram
boba is definitely a social drink, inviting others to join in the trend to stay connectedLayered matcha milk tea inviting customers to share its unique appealing appearance through social media.
Boba associated with identity of asian immigrants
549 tweets talking about boba and identity
-.Boba brings immigrants together during their younger years as they try to find their place in society.
-.On the other hand: boba is too shallow of a measurement of all asian identity, likened to the often ridiculed “boba liberals”: Looks sweet and well-presented, but no real glow, for asian culture traits.
Boba with its simple ingredients and strong social media presence is a cultural object that is readily adopted by generations of Asian Americans, But at some point in their lives, people graduated from the boba life.
This project ventured into the field of cultural studies, so I went through the process from study idea to collect data, to design and development, and I read a lot of papers on asian American identity. By reading about boba and cultural identity, I find that boba tea is pop-cultural imagery that is hard to ignore when discussing contemporary Asian American cultural identity. So can I state that boba represents Asian Americans?
In order to understand the experiences and opinions of asian, especially asian Americans, about boba tea.，I designed a survey, including 20 questions to find out the drinking habits and perceptions of boba tea among the Asian American community aged 18-35. As you can see, it is difficult to define the meaning of boba in the Asian community. I decided to use data to help me find the answer. And it did in turn help me to prove and correct some of my existing concepts.
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How might I visualize such a complex identity topic and making it resonate with the public not limited to Asians ?
Because there has been a lot of California-based boba tea industry research, for this project I am collecting data on the local milk tea market from the city where I live: New York. Therefore I can bypass subjective ideas and use objective data to explain why boba tea becomes popular among Asian Americans?
Re-categorize data
Each tea shop has its own naming principle, it is not very efficient to just follow the information shown on the menu. So, I further categorized and merged these categories into general categories
Crop content
the existing color extraction tends to extract background color as the biggest color block, so i cleans and extracts the beverage part.
Re-render tweets
the terms “boba” and “identity” appearing too frequently, so these two original search terms were deleted from the result
Objectivity
Staying true to the facts on cultural issues does not instill any of the author's subjective ideas
Clearity
Sort through complex information and interact well
Fun and playfulness
The overall visual also lean towards interactive and playful to fit the pop culture characteristics of boba tea.
Educational
If possible, the design should be content appealing and thus hopefully resonates with the public
Multiple rounds of iterations revolved around different aspects, including Narrative, data vis accuracy, and visual presentation. This was all done by absorbing test feedback between 15 designers and users
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Next, design details will be explained from aspects such as layout and visuals
Long data vis narrative vs self explore
How to present customization?
The journey of a cup of spilled boba tea
This work is a combination of objective and subjective work. After I had a preconceived general theme, I collected the corresponding data to create the expression. In this process, subjectivity may take over and affect the accuracy of the entire data vis work.
When I decided to start researching boba as my thesis, from an outsider's point of view, I kept presuming Boba helped Asian Americans to form their own identity as an immigrant minority. The more I researched, the more I realized the struggle and effort that immigrants have with cultural identity in their new environment.
