2018 Citizen's Budget of Iraq Case Study
Joshua Korenblat, Art Director, Graphicacy
Concept sketches
Outline
Cover
Why the Citizen's Budget of Iraq matters
With this understanding of a federal budget already in mind, I was introduced to the 2018 Citizen's Budget of Iraq project. This project is an initiative launched by the International Budget Partnership, which "collaborates with civil society around the world to use budget analysis and advocacy as a tool to improve effective governance and reduce poverty." Alongside my team at Graphicacy, I collaborated with Ipsos, the World Bank, and the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. Technology today has afforded these types of convivial collaborations that transcend national boundaries. I believe with these platforms, we're in a new era where we can collaborate for the common good with fewer constraints than ever before. Even in teams as small as five people, ambitious information design projects can be realized and shared for the common good.
Iraq is a new democracy, emerging from years of autocracy, war, and a struggle with terrorism. Unlike an autocracy, a democracy priviliges transparency between a government and its people. At the same time, Iraq's government serves a populace where about one out of five people over the age of fifteen can't read and write "a short, simple statement on their everyday life." Written documents about federal government spending are not inclusive designs, especially because amongst these people, " ‘literacy’ also encompasses ‘numeracy’, the ability to make simple arithmetic calculations."
The goal of the citizen's budget: Support the purpose of Iraq's fledgling democracy. We intended this infromation design project to serve as model for other counties in the Middle East and North Africa, as they aspire toward greater transparency and connection with their peoples.
For Iraq, this meant helping to make governmental priorities more clear and accesible to everyday citizens. In the same way as architects design onramps to buildings for people who can't climb the stairs, the citizen's budget is an onramp for those who might otherwise not be able to read or understand the Iraqi federal budget. The Iraqi Ministry of Finance has provided past federal budgets to their people. Yet they tended to rely heavily upon text and tables. This approach creates a barrier between the important information in the topic and those who aren't literate. Beyond the information, the twinned values of protecting people and recovering from terrorism, revealed in the allocations, remain opaque.
Even for those who could read this document, it might also appear to be too complicated. Bill Gates once remarked that there are many problems in the world that lack attention, but it's not that people don't care about them. Instead, they're just too complicated to see and understand. If we can't see a problem, how can we think about a problem? And if we can't think about a problem, how can we care about it? And if we can't care about a problem, how can we devise solutions to it and lead positive change? To make this project less complicated, design can sharpen and unclutter the essential ideas in it by itnroducing classic graphic design techniques of image, text, and space: charts and illustrations, a hierarchy of text, and plenty of open space for ideas to breathe.
Original Iraq Federal Budget document: pre-design
Beginning the project through research
To begin the Citizen's Budget of Iraq project, I researched examples of other Citizen's Budgets from around the world. I noticed a range of approaches. First, these documents would need to be distributed as PDFs online, and they would also need to be printed and distributed to people who might not have access to the internet.
Some designers hewed to a report look-and-feel, the type of data charts presented methodically in Power Point presentations. New Zealand took this approach, and the result is clear and evidence-based. Reports intend to provide people with more information than they already had. They can be efficient but also not memorable because they lack a story. Other Citizen's Budgets designed their documents to read like newsletters, as seen by South Africa's approach. Here, the design communicates more directly to an everyday citizen. This type of document reads like an explanation, helping people develop a new ability to understand the priorities of their government. Rwanda's Citizen's Budget exemplified the illustrated approach to a Citizen's Budget. The illustrations amplify the human story of federal budgetary allocations, making the content much more vivid, accesible, and shareable. By weaving in vignettes that evoke stories, the Rwandan Citizen's budget ensures that their content might be more engaging.
New Zealand: Report approach: inform
South Africa: Newsletter approach: explain
Rwanda: illustrated approach: tell a story
Deciding how to report, explain, and tell a story
Relative to other countries, Iraq presented some special contextual factors for designing. Iraq suffers from inflation, similar to countries such as Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. Financial values in the federal budget typically run in trillions and hundreds of billions. With so many vast numbers, emulating a report seemed problematic. As numbers increase to unimaginable levels, reading engagement levels can also decrease. Yet the report is also efficient, an important factor to consider too.
For our project, I tried to balance the efficient needs of the report, and a very quick deadline, with the need to explain. The explanation approach appealed to me because it can help to support readers in the greater purpose of reading a Citizen's Budget. As new participants in a democracy, they need to first be aware of the "why" and "how" of government spending, and this could lead to further inquiry and action.
We also sought to use icons and illustrations when appropriate, which introduced new possibilities of visual storytelling. Charts can rely upon labels to help guide the reader. Icons can help the charts appear less abstract, more pictorial, and help convey key comparisons with more immediacy. In this way, we could work with the principles first developed by the Austrian utopian Otto Neurath after World War I. His Istotype charts system proposed a universal language that could work when words alone failed. Research has affirmed that ideas supported by relevant images are more likely to be recalled too, so icons have a purpose beyond mere adornment. This stragegy contradicts information designer Edward Tufte to an extent, as he terms illustrative elements on charts, "chartjunk."
Reading the final Citizen's Bugdet
Under a short deadline, I designed the first-ever Citizen's Budget of Iraq working in English, from a script devised in collaboration with our team. I also sketched charts from spreadsheets of budget allocations supplied from the World Bank and the Ministry of Finance. For our examples, I'm actually going to show the Arabic version of this document, which I designed working with Arabic translators. After all, this is the document that actual citizens in Iraq would be reading. It also provides a test of how effectively the charts and illustrations convey big ideas.
To prepare for the translations, I had to determine how people would read the charts. Arabic reads from right to left, while English reads in the reverse direction. In general, I discovered that readers of Arabic have learned how to read charts the same way as English speakers, so it was safe to design charts that have left-to-right reading order.
Reading the pages...
The cover design evokes the Iraqi national flag, affiliating the word "Citizen" and the idea of an open budget with pride of country.
The opening spread helps the reader understand the purpose of the citizen's budget. I was concerned about the amount of text, but it's true that almost all communication in graphic design requires text. It's simply misleading to say, "a picture is worth a 1,000 words" in all cases.
The Ministry of Finance has prepared the country’s first citizen budget document for 2018 to strengthen its commitment toward furthering budget transparency, helping to raise public awareness about the federal budget process. Th is document is a simplifi ed version of the Iraqi Federal Budget Law. It aims to explain how the budget is prepared, illustrating the spending priorities and economic and social programs that the government will implement to improve the well-being of its citizens. Th e document presents information about government revenues and expenditures planned for all sectors (including health, education, social welfare, security, defense, and so on) for the current and previous years.
The next spread introduces the 19.7 trillion Iraqi dinar deficit. The remainder of the document attempts to explain why Iraq has this deficit and where taxpayer money is being directed. A divergent bar chart shows expenditures in gold and revenues in green. The lighter toned bars are subsets of the totals, indicating current expenditures and investment expenditures to the left, and oil and non-oil revenues to the right. As I noted before, I did not have to reverse the chart to read according to a reverse metaphor for direction of the bars. As a Western reader, my mind sees revenues going from left to right, and expenditures going the opposite direction.
This spread illustrates how the federal budget is developed over a fiscal year, in collaboration with the Ministry of Planning, Finance, and the Central Bank. I decided this would be a moment to weave in illustrations and the look-and-feel of a pictorial, sequential story. Given that the topic is procedural, a cartoony style could enhance the likelihood of the text being read. Iraq has diverse constituencies, and for this reason, I intended the cartoon figures to not have any type of gender or descriptive garb. At the same time, I wanted them to appear lively and expressive enough to help animate the story and the procedures it describes. Because this section reads more like a comic book than a chart, I did have to reverse the layout and reading order of the steps from the original English language version of the design.
This section introduces a big picture view of the 2018 Iraqi Federal Bugdet. To illustrate how public money will be spent, I thought it appropriate to use the visual metaphor of hand and shiny coins, which are scaled by area to represent allocations. Compensation of employees represents the largest coin, at nearly half the public money spending, while school books represents the smallest coin, at 145 Billion and .1% of the total. One coin that's valued 772 Billion dinar, or nearly 1% of the total budget, represents "Kuwait War compensation": penance from Sadaam Hussein's invasion in 1991. In keeping with the Isotype ethos, some of these icons are from the Noun Project, an intiative to support universal icons of communication, inspired by Otto Neurath's work.
The treemap below shows that most of the public money, 84.2%, is sourced from oil and mining revenues. The facing page details how new tax measures will help improve non-oil revenues.
The dataset for this spread below detailed allocations to governorates in Iraq that need to be rebuilt following war and ISIS occupations. Because the money was flowing from the capital, Baghdad, to the other governorates, I decided a geographic choropleth map would be the most graphic and readable.
The spread below shows the planned budget deficit in Iraq, contrasting 2018 to 2017, suppplemented by percent change charts.The facing page shows how the government plans to cover for the planned deficit through a variety of intiitatives. The shape and colors of the chart evoke an Iraqi dinar.
This spread shows the top five greatest increases in governement spending, with a more detailed chart for those who want to see increases and decreases in allocation for different sectors.
The spread below shows that 15% of the budget will go to support reconstruction, development, and projects to mitigate the effects of oil and gas production. The Iraqi grovernment's support for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) can be seen in the maps where the greatest concentration of spending, the dark gold color, is in the northeast region, Iraqi Kurdistan. Darker text in the table indicates locations in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The spread below shows investment expenditures from the development budget, to "improve public infrastructure and provide citizens with quality education, health, social and security services." The bar charts compare donor dispersements with investment project expenditures. When designing this publication, it's important to keep an eye out for balanced spreads. Information dense charts contrast with a more open page of simple text callouts illustrated by icons and charts.
The final spread offers readers an opportunity to contact a relevant government office with questions.
Closing cover
Reflection
In summary, I believe this project was a good model for future projects, and it provides a foundation for future collaborations for making complex federal budgets more accessible for citizens in a developing democracy, such as Iraq. While the amount of text and the level of detail in the charting might not be appropriate for the type of everyday citizen who needs greater access to government information, this is an initial step into greater transparency through visualization and design. The final publication also has a legacy on the Iraqi Ministry of Finance website, where it's posted. We're hoping that this project will be shared with other countries in the Middle East and North Africa too, as they consider joining the Citizen's Budget movement.
What if information design is about more than designing information?
One day, a friend of the writer Barry Lopez asked him a question. How could her daughter become a professional writer? What did she need to know? His response:
"...if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need...."
In a similar way, information designers aren't simply trying to display as much information as possible in a relatively small space. Information designers serve a fundamental human need: to make sense of the world. Ideally, information designers can choose causes they believe in. They engage with problem-solving and making sense out of the world presented in a dataset. To begin to make sense of the dataset, information designers need to understand what beliefs and assumptions informed the need to collect and organize the data. Through exploring and explaining the data, information designers also create a portrait of what's most important to show in the content.
Federal budgets aren't simply allocations of money and taxpayer funds. They reveal a nation's priorities. This became evident to me while designing the Death & Taxes project with my team at Graphicacy. This poster, which began with the information designer Jess Bachmann, is now part of Graphicacy's Timeplots series of information-rich posters. The visualization displays President Obama's 2016 discretionary budget request to congress. Despite the rich detail, readers can see right away that the United States, even under a more progressive president, prioritizes its defense while arts and humanities programs remain diminished in importance. Datasets for federal budget spending reveal what a government upholds as most important, in light of the people they represent. I view this poster and see our values in reflection.
