Role
Developer & Product Lead | Mowa Lab Project
Skills
of Rice
Overview
The Journey of Rice is an interactive visual essay exploring how rice spread across the world and evolved into hundreds of culturally distinct dishes. The project traces the grain's independent origins in East Asia and West Africa and follows its movement through trade routes, colonial expansion, and migration. Through animated maps, timelines, and narrative sections, the project illustrates how rice transformed into regional dishes such as jollof, biryani, congee, paella, and rice and peas.
Why was it built?
The project was built to explore how product design and interactive visualisation can make complex cultural and historical systems easier to understand.
- Demonstrating how product thinking can be applied to educational and cultural storytelling.
- Exploring interactive approaches to visualising migration and cultural exchange.
- Experimenting with visual essays as a digital product format.
How was it built?
The project was developed as a scroll-driven interactive experience combining narrative storytelling with dynamic data visualisation. The frontend application was built using React and TypeScript, with Tailwind CSS used for layout and styling. The interface leverages modern UI components and animation libraries to create a smooth scrollytelling experience.
- React + TypeScript for building a modular interactive interface.
- Tailwind CSS for responsive layout and visual styling.
- Framer Motion for animation and scroll-driven transitions.
- Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles to render the global migration map.
- Custom data structures modelling rice origins, migration routes, and regional dishes.
What did I do?
- Designed the product concept and narrative structure.
- Conducted research on rice origins, migration routes, and global cuisine traditions.
- Created the dataset linking rice varieties, migration patterns, and regional dishes.
- Designed the interaction model for the scroll-based storytelling experience.
- Implemented the interactive visualisations and animations.
- Defined the visual system and information architecture of the project.
Results
- Produced an interactive project demonstrating how product design can communicate complex cultural systems.
- Created a reusable framework for future interactive storytelling and data visualisation projects.