Paul Kahn, Hugh Dubberly, and Liuhuaying Yang
December 15, 2022

Abstract:
From its emergence in 2019, millions of people have died from COVID.
Representing milestones (1,000 deaths, 100,000 deaths, 1 million deaths) challenges journalists and designers.
Such large numbers are difficult to comprehend, and they are difficult to represent meaningfully.
At the same time, each number was once a living person.
Reconciling the large group while also acknowledging each individual is quite difficult.
Maya Lin achieved such fusion in the Vietnam War memorial.
The AIDs quilt is another example.
Also the Stolpersteine Project in Germany.

COVID provided a unique opportunity for experimentation, as journalists and designers grappled with the challenge of each new milestone.This article includes many examples.
And the article is itself an example of how collecting a corpus of related works points to new ways of studying design.

Links:
PDF
http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Unimagineable_Death.pdf

COVIC Visualizer: COVID-19 Database
https://covic-visualizer.herokuapp.com/

Behind the Scenes of “Unimaginable Death”
https://nightingaledvs.com/behind-the-scenes-of-unimaginable-death/

COVIC: Collecting Visualizations of COVID-19 to Outline a Space of Possibilities
http://www.dubberly.com/articles/covic-collecting-visualizations-of-covid-19-to-outline-a-space-of-possibilities.html