Migrating Over Troubled Water: Map the Story of Doaa

“A physical story map where the reader follows the migration story of Doaa by assembling the fragments of her journey.”
The physical box with the layers ready to assemble.

What it is about

Maps tell stories and we want to tell the story of Doaa.

While migration is heavily quantified through data and statistics, the human experience of the journey is usually left unmapped. Our project seeks to address this gap by assembling geography, personal testimony, and spatio-temporal data into a counter-cartographic practice [1]. We center this exploration on the story of Doaa, transforming her journey into an interactive, analogue story map. The result is a physical layer box where the reader manually inserts frames to assemble the story.

How we built it

We built upon storytelling theory [2][3] to translate the emotional peaks and troughs of Doaa’s journey [4][5] into a multi-layered story map. The initial sketches were hand-drawn and later refined in Procreate to produce the final visualizations. After prototyping in SketchUp, the physical layer box was laser-cut at Makerspace using MDF plates and acrylic sheets, based on a parametric design generated by an open-source, Python-based box generator.

The basemap was developed in QGIS using a custom CRS Gnomonic projection centered on the epicenter of the story (34°N, 34°E; Levantine Sea) to create a magnifying-glass effect, with a Geometry Generator used to project a polar grid outward from the center of the sea. The design was finalized in Illustrator & Photoshop, using a fisheye distortion to further reinforce the narrative’s epicenter.

The final assembly consists of five layers hand-aligned with the basemap. An accompanying audio recording provides a narration of Doaa’s story.

Challenges we ran into

While the project concept emerged quickly, selecting a suitable story was our first challenge. Once the story was chosen, the main difficulty lay in representing the subjective experience of migration into a cartographic representation.

What we're proud of

We are particularly proud of creating a physical story map that engages with the qualitative and sensitive dimensions of a migration story, adopting an approach we consider both important and often underrepresented.

What we learned

We learned how to apply storytelling and counter-cartographic principles, including how to build a narrative arc and emotional journey, as well as practical skills in QGIS, Procreate, laser cutting and model making. Throughout the model making process, problem-solving was our main takeaway.

What's next

The box was designed as a modular system, allowing it to be reused to tell different stories or to expand existing ones by adding new layers. In addition, we see potential for further research on the user experience of physical in comparison to digital story maps as well as counter-cartographic practices.
The final box with all the layers combined.
The final box with all the layers combined.
Zoom into the upper right corner with the TUM Tower in the background.

Sources

[1] Kollektiv Orangotango+, 2018. This Is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies. transcript Verlag.
[2] Lupton, E., 2017. Design is Storytelling. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.
[3] Roth, R.E., 2021. Cartographic Design as Visual Storytelling: Synthesis and Review of Map-Based Narratives, Genres, and Tropes. The Cartographic Journal 58, 83–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2019.1633103
[4] Flemming, M., 2017. Doaa - Meine Hoffnung trug mich über das Meer. Droemer Knaur Verlagsgruppe, München.
[5] TEDx Talks, 2015. The refugee boat hero who saved a child and stirred a continent. Thessaloniki. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00zfzk4gdg
Students
Monica Jazmin Cristaldo and Tom Fieguth

15th intake
Supervisor
Juliane Cron, M.Sc.
Keywords
Counter-Cartography, Storytelling, Migration, Story Map
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