“Design is my conviction and my religion,” says Iranian designer Maral Pourkazemi. For her master thesis project “The Iranian Internet” at the University of Applied Science in Potsdam, she created a beautiful infographic which contains six content panels to explain the complexity of online censorship in Iran. Including information on the general Internet usage, Iran's national web project, namely the “Halal” Internet and its evasion, the Iranian blogosphere, the cyber police, criminal hackers, and the systems of governance, the six panels decipher the Iranian Internet between freedom and isolation. This thesis has become a much talked about design activist project. Gestalten.tv sat down with Maral Pourkazemi to talk about her infographic vision and how she has made an ugly topic accessible through visual storytelling.
Check out Maral Pourkazemi's website this-is-maral.com/
My master thesis is about the Iranian Internet. After months of research I designed this Infographic which contains six content panels. It starts with general informations about the Internet usage (1), goes on with the idea of a "Halal" or "national" Internet (2), shows two ways of how the Iranian user escapes the "Halal" Internet (3), a little part of the iranian Blogosphere showing what kind of blogs get filtered (4), going on with the sophisticated cyber repression (5) which is initiated by the paradox system of government (6).
