Two alumni of the Information Design and Data Visualization MFA program are winners of the World Data Visualization Prize 2023, bestowed by partner organizations Information Is Beautiful and World Government Summit to honor exemplary data visualization and information design work shaping the world. 

Liuhuaying Yang ’18 won first prize in the Interactive category for her piece “Four Seasons” and Qingyue Li ’19 won third prize in the poster category with the design “Happy People, Happy Planet?”. 

“Do the countries we traditionally define as the happiest also make our environment happy? And is consumption causing net negative or net positive happiness? This poster addresses these questions with incisive graphics.” By Qingyue Li and Enrique Mendoza T. “This beautifully elegant visualisation uses the metaphor of a tree in different seasons to spotlight different aspects of progress. Hover over the branches to understand the present, the roots to see the past, and the sky to learn about the future.” By Liuhuaying Yang.

With a competition theme of “What Just Happened? Dashboard of the Present Future, and The Future of Frontiers,” entries focused on the past, present and future of society and governments, using the power of data-visualization to illuminate data on the innovations, decisions and metrics that can be used to drive and measure progress.  

Just 23 posters and 30 interactive designs were selected by the jury team comprised of writers, designers, and journalists with expertise in data visualization including Alberto Cairo, Amanda Makulec, Gurman Bhatia, and David McCandless, the founder of Information is Beautiful. 

Qingyue Li is an accomplished architectural designer from Beijing, China. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Virginia Tech in 2017, where she honed her skills in design and acquired a strong foundation in architecture. In 2019, she completed her Master’s in Data Visualization from Northeastern University, where she gained expertise in using data to inform and enhance her designs. Currently, working as a  UX/UI Designer at Esri, a location intelligence platform provider.

Liuhuaying Yang lives in Vienna where she works at the Complexity Science Hub. “I feel honored to have won 1st with my experimental piece,” she said in a tweet following the awards announcement. “I really enjoyed the creation process and am happy to know people like this work.”