The World of 100

April 11, 2009 10:05 PM

The World of 100 -- 20 Posters by Toby Ng (via Daily Dish and Made in England)

Toby Ng: This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

posted by fourcheesemac (9 comments total)

World of extremely small text.
posted by Science! at 10:24 PM on April 11, 2009

Yar. These look cool but I can't read them. Most of them at least.
posted by bardic at 10:36 PM on April 11, 2009

These are kind of cool, but I would not hang any of them on my wall. Are they "posters" because they're vector graphics?
posted by cmoj at 12:16 AM on April 12, 2009

I could see these being really cute on a classroom wall.

I think most of them speak for themselves, but for the less obvious ones with a lot of text:

Language
50 speak other languages.
6 speak Spanish.
6 speak Russian.
8 speak Hindi.
4 speak Arabic.
9 speak English.
17 speak Chinese.

Freedom
48 can't speak, act according to their faith and conscience due to harassment, imprisonment, torture or death.
52 can.

Fear
20 live in fear of death by bombardment, armed attack, landmines, or of rape or kidnapping by armed pgroups.
80 don't.

Money
6 own 59& (all from USA).
74 own 39%.
20 share 2%.

Food
50 don't have reliable source of food and hungry some/all time.
30 always have enough to eat (15 overweight).
20 undernourished (1 dying of starvation).

Religion
33 Christians.
24 others / atheists.
19 Muslims.
13 Hindus.
6 Buddhists.
5 believe there are spirits in all natures.

Energy
20 consume 80%.
80 consume 20%.

posted by lucidium at 2:51 AM on April 12, 2009

THIS.. IS.. SP!
posted by fleacircus at 3:07 AM on April 12, 2009

AIDS no longer looks like a problem! Immunodefensive win!
posted by hypersloth at 3:44 AM on April 12, 2009

This would be better if (1) if the illustrations were any good and (2) the posters bore out the idea of the "village of 100" in any discernible way. As things stand, they don't convey the information any differently than they would have if he'd just said "48% of the world's population is male, 52% is female."

Also, the banana one is sort of offensive.
posted by wreckingball at 8:56 AM on April 12, 2009

It's a neat idea to illustrate these facts, but the way it's been done makes some horribly disturbing statistics look... cute. It's also kinda misleading when you have a giant mortar board and the word education, then looking closely what it really means is "99 people out of 100 do not have a college education."
posted by wundermint at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2009

Gee, I thought they were kind of clever. But what do I know?
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:00 AM on April 13, 2009 [1 favorite]