WUBI: Beyond the Characters

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The Challenge For our Exhibition Design final, our class was asked to listen to the Radiolab podcast episode “The Wubi Effect”, which tells the story of how the Chinese language was adapted to the standard QWERTY keyboard in 1983.

The goal of the assignment is to create a scale model of the plan for the exhibition creatively guiding the visitor through a narrative build around the story told about the Wubi Method.

Project Vision In the story about the creation of Wubi and it’s impact it had on China at the time, we found the narrative around Professor Wang’s journey to solving the problem to be remarkable and a story we needed to spotlight. Therefore, in our project, we focused primarily on this storylien while also providing the viewer with an understanding of the stakes of solving this problem for China and the Chinese language as a whole.

PROJECT DETAILS

Design Team

Instructor

Mary Jordan Paige Gilstad Nick Pippen

Hannah Smotrich

Collaboration

Areas & Skills

Mary Jordan provided sketches during the ideation phase, illustrations for the murals inside the exhibit, helped with the narrative of the exhibit, and assisted with assembling and creating material for the final prototype.

This project included group collaboration, exhibition design, graphic design, 3D model making/prototypes, visual identity, and multi-media exploration of a narrative.

Paige Gilstad was a large contributer in finalizing the narrative, developing walls within the exhibit, creating a 3D effect on some walls using a Cricut machine, and assembling the final prototype.

Nick Pippen worked primarily in developing the visual identity of the exhibit and creating posters and a postcard to promote the exhibit. He assisted in assembling the model and photographing the final protoype.

Credits Adler, Simon. “The Wubi Effect.” Radiolab WYNC Studios, 14 Aug. 2020. https://open. spotify.com/show/2hmkzUtix0qTqvtpPcMzEL?si=7911115a8b314dea

VISUAL IDENTITY Color Palette

Typefaces Title Digi Grotesk Bold Condensed - Regular Subtitles/Captions

Avenir - Medium

Body Avenir - Book

Image Treatment

Images within our exhibit are treated with a filter that gives the appearance of screens in the 1980s to match the time period that this narrative takes place in.

Additional Visual Assets

Some imagery in our exhibit are walls of keyboard keys created to represent the outstanding number of Chinese characters that must be condensed down to a QWERTY keyboard.

PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL Poster

Postcard

Coming to you December 23 - Febuary 14, 2024 in Ann Arbor Michigan.

MAP OF EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION FINAL MODEL Our final exhibition model consists of the 7 sections listed in the key for the map of the exhibit. The following images were taken after completing our final model of our exhibition concept at a 1/4” scale.

Our final documentation includes these photographs of our model as well as a description of the content and purpose of the section. For some of the areas of the exhibit, I have created digital mock-ups which serve as an example of how the exhibit would look at full scale inside the Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

1. BEYOND THE ALPHABET This section includes our title wall, featuring 70,000 clickable keyboard keys representative of the 70,000 Chinese characters, with the title, “Wubi: Beyond the Characters”, on top of this keyboard wall. Here, the viewer is introduced to the huge feat that was condensing this many characters into just 26 keys. On the column there is an introduction to Professor Wang.

2. ALGORITHM BIAS After a brief introduction to the problem and Professor Wang, there is a mural that visualizes the doubts Wang faced before solving this problem. If China couldn’t computerize Chinese or to Chinesise computers, then they were going to be on the outside looking in–this was what they were trying to solve.

3. SHAPES THAT SPEAK This is a space to further explain and explore how the Chinese language works–breaking it down and comparing it to traditional romantic languages (phonetic).

In this space, a video plays with an explanation on how the Chinese language works. On the wall, the word “tree” as a chinese character is explained.

4. WANG & WUBI In this exhibit section, this long hallway represents Wang’s 5-year journey. Professor Wang meticulously dissected 10,000 characters into their fundamental components, yielding 120,000 notecards stacked to a height of a three-story building represented by the graphic on the wall. After these 5 years, he condensed these cards and assigned them to the QWERTY keyboard. At the end of the hallway, a screen showcases footage of his UN presentation — a triumphant display marking the culmination of his achievement.

5. HOW WUBI WORKS In this section, the Wubi method is explained simply to the viewer before moving on to being able to experiment with building Chinese words as well as try to type on a large Wubi keyboard.

6. TYPING TOMORROW Typing tomorrow shows another typing method for the Chinese language, Pinyin, which has taken over as the primary method of typing Chinese characters. However, typing competitions have shown that Wubi is the faster method of typing in comparison with Pinyin. The screens and typing hands visualize the speed at which each method allows the user to type.

7. STEP INTO WUBI A fun ending to the exhibit is the opportunity to play with the various forms of Chinese characters to create words using a light table, as well as an oversized keyboard and screen projected onto the floor and wall that users can dance across and try to type using the Wubi method.

FINAL DELIVERABLES