Comprehending the Indian Ocean Tsunami
The 2004 tsunami is remembered as a wave. With Dr. Vivek Kant, I turned three months of newspaper reports into an illustrated book that explains why it became a disaster, and who it hurt most.
Duration
6 months,
published 2023
ISBN 978-93-5912-893-1
Role
Co-author
Research
Information design
Illustration and layout
Collaborator
Dr. Vivek Kant
Department of Design, IIT Kanpur
Outcome
Published book
Second Prize, Games Track, India HCI 2023 · Best Thesis Project, Communication Design · Paper in the India HCI 2023 proceedings (Springer)
The warning existed. It got lost on the way. Step through the morning from the book’s timeline: messages, a fax sent to a former minister’s home, and the wave reaching the Chennai coast at 9:17.
Hazards are natural, disasters are not
Most accounts of the tsunami stop at the wave. They rarely ask why some communities lost so much more than others, or why a warning that arrived in time never reached the coast.
The book takes Terry Cannon’s line as its starting point. A disaster happens when a hazard meets people who are exposed and vulnerable, and both of those are made by society: where homes are built, which mangroves were cleared, who gets heard. The challenge was to carry that argument from dense research to readers who would never open a disaster studies paper.
The wave is only one of three ingredients. The book’s “Elements of the Disaster” chapter, with the evidence for each.
I co-wrote, illustrated and designed the book
Dr. Vivek Kant and I co-authored the book. I coded the archive, shaped the themes into chapters, drew the illustrations, including the cover, and designed the infographics and layout.
Sources in, a book out
The record was written in the moment
Our primary source was Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria’s collection of newspaper clippings from 27 December 2004 to 31 March 2005. Reports contradicted each other, and the island tribes, the people most at risk, appeared least. So we coded every clipping and let recurring themes, not chronology, decide the structure.
Loss had to be told with care
The subject is death, displacement and communities pushed to the margins. Documentary photographs would have been graphic and intrusive, so the book uses hand-drawn illustration, a limited palette that changes with each chapter, and recurring motifs of tropical leaves and turtles that keep the islands’ ecology in view.
Coding turned three months of headlines into five themes. Select a theme to see its codes and the chapters it fed. The chapter mapping is simplified.
The form follows the information
Rather than running every topic as continuous text, each piece of content got the form that suits it.
Stories, numbers and ideas each get their own form
Lived experience became narrative, so readers start beside a Jarawa hunting party before they meet a tectonic plate. Scale became infographics: “5 megatons of TNT” lands harder as five crates than as a number. Systems became conceptual illustrations drawn in the same style as everything else. What we gave up: the authority of an academic report’s uniform layout.
The Pressure and Release model as the spine
To move readers from “what happened” to “why”, we charted every theme onto Blaikie’s Pressure and Release model. The pressure side shows vulnerability building from root causes to the moment the hazard struck; the release side shows the recovery working back through the same layers. What we gave up: a simple chronological story.
Loss had to be told with care
The subject is death, displacement and communities pushed to the margins. Documentary photographs would have been graphic and intrusive, so the book uses hand-drawn illustration, a limited palette that changes with each chapter, and recurring motifs of tropical leaves and turtles that keep the islands’ ecology in view.
Look and feel
The book had to show death, displacement and communities pushed to the margins without making readers look away. Documentary photographs of the tsunami are graphic, and many of the people in them never consented to being seen. So every page is illustrated. Drawing let us show what happened with care, and let difficult ideas sit beside human stories in one consistent visual language.
A published, illustrated book on disaster resilience
The research became a 100-page illustrated book that presents the tsunami as a layered social and ecological event shaped by culture, vulnerability, governance and resilience.
It moves from the islands’ communities and beliefs, through the science of the quake and the failures of warning, to the PAR analysis and what recovery got right. After publication, Dr. Kant and I discussed the research method and design approach in an interview with The Literature Times.
Publication
The project culminated in the publication of Comprehending the Indian Ocean Tsunami, 26 December 2004, co-authored with Dr. Vivek Kant and published by Astitva Prakashan. The 110-page illustrated publication brings together disaster research, thematic analysis, information design, and visual storytelling to make complex socio-ecological systems more accessible to students, educators, designers, and policymakers.
Following its release, the book was featured in an interview with The Literature Times, where we discussed our research methodology, the use of archival newspaper reports as primary data, and our design approach to communicating vulnerability, resilience, and disaster preparedness through narrative and visual communication.