World Heritage in Danger 2023 by Mihajlo Jakovljev

“World Heritage in Danger 2023” is an information design and data visualization project with an aim to raise awareness of decaying beauty in our world with a skeptical overtone.

The data presented is public and taken from The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Heritage in Danger, List of World Heritage in Danger, 2023.

The project is divided in three parts: (1) Presenting World Heritage Sites in Danger – divided by geographical area, country and type; (2) Inscription years for World Heritage in Danger 2023 – divided by geographical area, country, type, and year of inscription; and (3) Assistance to World Heritage in Danger 2023 – divided by international assistance and number of successful requests under the World Heritage Convention.

When put together, the three present all data one needs to know about the World Heritage in Danger for 2023.
To portray how topics like these often go unnoticed in our daily lives, the project at hand has a subtle skeptical tone. When presenting three separate posters the author aimed to slightly distract the viewer with design elements such as scratch marks, guidelines, and recommendations, all to give off a feeling of vandalism or work in progress. The aim is to showcase: (1) how easy it is to distract viewers from problems we don’t want to deal with; and (2) how we treat problems that don’t affect us directly. In addition, the main skeptical motif is its gentle beauty – a beautiful presentation of something that is falling apart – thus achieving hollow aesthetics.

In conclusion, the aim of this project is to provide policy makers, NGOs, academics, as well as everyday people, with functional data presentation and hollow aesthetics to inform, educate and raise awareness of our own negligence of World Heritage in Danger 2023.