Project #10 Translation Device | Apple Global Suppliers
Designed by Haoshu Yang.
Description and Design Process
Every year, Apple’s fall event catches attention of millions of people
across the world. The newly released products become hot topics of the
tech media coverage as well as the next-year gossip. Whether people talk
about the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch or else, the new features, the
more powerful capabilities and the controversial looks always lead to
Apple with the word printed on every product’s packing box— ‘Designed by
Apple in California’.
Apart from Apple in California, people discuss less about the other
manufacturing companies behind the product or think about where the
manufactures and assemblers are located. “Made in China!”, some may say
without a hesitation. But is it true? As Fred P. Hochberg writes in the
article “The iPhone Isn’t Made in China—It’s Made Everywhere”—“American
audio chips, Korean batteries, Congolese minerals, Japanese cameras,
German accelerometers: The iPhone may well be the most truly global
product yet.” [1] Hence, I decide to make an animated visualization
showing the Apple suppliers across the world.
I mainly refer to the Principle 7: Make Data Visible [2] from Data
Feminism in designing the visualization. A world map is a good container
to show all the suppliers equally across the world and make their labor
visible. Below are the three initial concepts of this map. The first one
is the animation that shows every company and its name one by one on the
map. The second one shows all the suppliers on the map and highlights
the mouse pointing ones with their names. The third one categorize the
suppliers according to mouse pointing countries instead of the locations
considering about the low accuracy of the mouse to the overlapping
locations in the global map. Finally, I decide to combine the first and
the second draft with special process to solve the mouse low precision
problem.
[1] Hochberg, Fred P. “The iPhone Isn't Made in China-It's Made
Everywhere.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 31 Jan. 2020,
www.wsj.com/articles/the-iphone-isnt-made-in-chinaits-made-everywhere-11580485139.
[2] D'Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren Klein. “7. Show Your Work · Data
Feminism.” Data Feminism, The MIT Press, 16 Mar. 2020,
data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/0vgzaln4/release/2.
[3] Apple, Inc.. “Apple Supplier Responsibility 2019 Supplier List.”
Apple, 2019,
www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf.
[4] Google, Inc.. “Web Services: Geocoding API” Google Developers, 2020,
developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/start.
[5] Baidu, Inc.. “逆地理编码 百度地图API SDK.” 百度地图开放平台,
lbsyun.baidu.com/index.php?title=webapi%2Fguide%2Fwebservice-geocoding.
[6] Mapbox, Inc.. “Static Images API manual doc.” Mapbox, 2020,
docs.mapbox.com/api/maps/static-images/.
Reflection
From Apple’s supplier list PDF file, we see a 33-page table of 812
locations of the top 200 suppliers in alphabetical order. With a quick
glance, we may only notice the huge amount of factories in China, Japan,
and United States, ignoring the others. Therefore, to better make all
the suppliers’ effort visible, I use red circle to highlight their
locations so that the solitary companies are revealed, say,
STMicroelectronics N.V.’s branch in Malta that locates at the center of
Mediterranean.
So, I hope this map could give people a more comprehensive understanding
of how the daily smartphones on their hands are manufactured. Instead of
saying that an iPhone is designed from Apple in California and made in
China, it is the product comes from the global efforts, from the people
in different races and different places.