The Butterfly Fauna of Jilin Province
Approved by Professor Li Yinghua
Designed by Xingeiai Fang
Directed by Pro. Rodrick Bamford
This project is a transdisciplinary program. By means of multimedia strategies, it achieves new aesthetic values which combine the publishing of entomology research and the affordance of visual arts. The reason I led this project as my design research was that we can hardly find any entomological encyclopedia which is based on the local habitats. Thus, I wanted to fill this blank and provide knowledge of butterflies to the local audience. The project derives from the up-coming research publication by Professor Li Yinghua: Butterfly Fauna of Jilin Province. The development of the project has received her approval.
Starting off by its definition, entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the book The Butterfly Fauna of Jilin Province written by Professor Li, she compiled 7 families, 98 genera, 186 species and the subspecies of the butterflies inhabiting here. Broadly speaking, the main constituents of butterflies in Jilin Province, are the eastern floras, namely the Chinese-Himalayan floras. My project, due to the limitation of volume, only selected some representative butterfly species in this area.
Entomology contents in this project involve characteristics, habitat, natural enemy and the life cycle of butterflies. New media adoption, 3d modeling technologies are used to create different stages of the growth of butterflies. For example, when describing Byasa, I provided the audience with a set of 3D modelling illustrations of its life cycle: the eggs, caterpillars, pupae and the adult butterfly.
)The environment plays a decisive role in the physiology of butterflies. As a result, the project provides the basic information of Jilin Province. This page (sample) demonstrates a bunch of information: firstly, we can see the coordinates of Jilin Province: 43°42’N, 126°12’E (43 degrees, 42 seconds north; 126 degrees, 12 seconds east). In fact, people are not able to precisely capture the coordinates and can not image where it exactly locates. Unless we can get on the space shuttle to get an overview. So how to make it easier to read? My solution is to offer a series of other famous places which stand in proximity to the longitude of Jilin Province. Through this comparative method, we can rapidly know approximately where it is. Surprisingly, I found that the Hokkaido in Japan, Caspien Sea, Florence in Italy, Toulouse and Marseille in France all sit around the same longitude.
Hierarchy of the butterflies is very important - this systematic category distinguishes species, genus and the family of butterflies. For general public readers, this project provides its own genealogical method. For instance, these coloring circles are utilized as referencing signs to mark different levels of the butterfly genealogy. In this page, the family is marked by a red circle with a bold uppercase ‘F’ inside; the genus a yellow circle with an uppercase ‘G’ inside; the species a light blue circle with a lowercase ‘s’ inside. When they view the butterflies in the online gallery, they will quickly get acknowledged of the genealogical attribute of a butterfly by referring to the circles beside the image. In this way, the audience will crystallize the conception of butterfly genealogy.
