Life Garden
Concept
For this assignment, we created a visualization of the world’s birth and death rates, inspired by a website that simulates births and deaths around the globe using real-time data.
However, unsure about how to extract the data without an API, we chose to use information from a database and came across The World Factbook (TWF), published by the CIA. The publication, available online in 2017, included lists of the world’s countries by descending birth and death rates (per 1,000 persons). Unfortunately, it's no longer accessible, at least not with the links we used in the project's documentation.
We coded a Python program to organize TWF’s data and generate a text file, which is then used by the Processing sketch.
Sketch
The sketch allows the user to select a country from a drop-down menu. In return, it generates as many butterflies (presented as sprite animations) as the birth rate minus the death rate in the chosen country (the population´s growth rate) in 2016. Each butterfly flutters for some time and then “dies” (begins to fall and eventually disappears). If the total number of butterflies that are “alive” at any time is less than the country’s growth rate, then more butterflies – as many as needed to maintain the population – are generated (“born”) to repopulate the space. Once the country is changed on the menu, the butterfly births and deaths adjust to the new population.