New Paradigm of Social Poster Embedding Unexpected Graphic Pattern for the Ongoing Issue, Radiation Contamination in Fukushima

A poster must be sufficiently informative to convey a suitable message which reflects the genuine characteristics of the topic. A social poster design deals with social issues, which are not instantaneous events where existing in a dynamic society. Therefore, the social poster design has to represent the continuous consequences due to the social incident. On 11 March in 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit off the east coast of Japan, caused 15,821 deaths, 3,962 missing, and 5,940 injuries in 20 Japanese prefectures as reported by The National Police Agency of Japan (Dunbar et al., 2011). Though the earthquake, aftershocks and tsunamis ended, it is an unfinished tragedy, due to the continuous exposure of the radioactive contaminated water by the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The highly contaminated water has accumulated on roofs and it keeps flowed into the Pacific Ocean when it rains (McCurry, 2015). This study aims to present the ongoing impact of radioactive materials to our society on a social poster through an animated graphic. The randomly created background patterns within the poster, symbolize the unfinished radioactive leaking and its circulation in our environment. Hence, this poster is a dynamically changing rather than a static graphic poster, much like the continuous changes occurring within the environment, due to the Fukushima event. In the middle, the red solid circle not only reflects the Japanese flag but also symbolizes the contaminated Earth. For the background patterns, I generated the random motion of oblique lines by computer programming using Processing, which is an open source programming language. The randomly generated graphic by Processing, referred to as animated graphic, exhibits the unexpected radioactive exposures due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The red circle represented Japan and the Earth suffered by the ongoing contamination that it was depicted by transparent red that the symbol and the patterns are overlapped and coexist. It should be noted that the printed version of the poster is captured from the digital work, which can be found at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ulcosh5dpm1xw85/index.html?dl=0. The animated graphic shown in the dynamic poster, informs an audience of the ongoing social issue that the radioactivity which has been leaking into the ocean since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Unlike a traditional, static print poster, it raises the audiences' awareness, empathy and understanding of the tragedy using dynamic data, affecting a different reaction.