Design Sense

An infographic to capture the travel experience of disabled veterans earns Yoona Lee ’24 finalist honors in Cooper Hewitt competition.

BY IAN ALDRICH

Last year, Yoona “Sarah” Lee’s grandfather fell suddenly ill, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. When Lee returned to her home in Seoul, South Korea, that summer and saw her grandfather for the first time, she was heartbroken. As hard as it was to see him navigate his new physical reality, it was even more emotional to hear him talk about it. Hardest of all were his dashed hopes of flying to San Francisco to visit his daughter, Lee’s aunt.

“You could just hear the pain in his voice,” the Fifth Former says. “He hadn’t seen her in awhile and he just felt that because he was in a wheelchair, it would be too difficult to fly to see her.”

A new world began to emerge for Lee — one she started to see through her grandfather’s eyes. In particular, she thought about the many flights she had taken between South Korea and the United States. Had she seen anyone in a wheelchair get on the plane before? How had she missed them? What else had she missed about the challenges that many disabled people face in their day-to-day lives?

“I started thinking more and more about those long flights and what it must be like for someone in a wheelchair to be on them,” Lee says. “And then I came across this New York Times story about this paralyzed veteran named Charles Brown. He shared all the difficulties someone in a wheelchair has to face — getting through security, getting on the plane, going to the bathroom — in order to fly somewhere. That really opened my eyes and made me want to do something to support [the nonprofit group] Paralyzed Veterans of America.”

Lee felt there was a story to share; something that could be relayed to able-bodied airline passengers about a different kind of journey that others around them had to navigate. Partnering with a close childhood friend, Youjung Shin, a 10th grade student at Phillips Academy Andover, Lee began work late last summer to leverage data from the Times article to create an infographic that visualizes the experience of a disabled veteran like Brown boarding and disembarking a plane. The work includes a “customer journey map” that illustrates the emotions that accompany each step, right up to when they leave the airport at the end of their flight.

The result is a graphical arc that is quick and digestible. Something that, say, could be turned into a pamphlet and read on a plane or at an airport. Lee and Shin finalized the work in late January and submitted the infographic the following month to the Cooper Hewitt 2023 National High School Design Competition. In early spring, the duo’s work was selected from 707 entries as one of three finalists. The winner will be announced in June.

Lee hopes the increased visibility will help lead to her ultimate goal of more broadly sharing her design so that others can take notice of what she now sees.

“It’s about creating more awareness,” she says. “We don’t really treat disabled people with enough respect or acknowledge what they have to get through. Hopefully with this infographic, airplane passengers can pay more attention to disabled travelers and have a different point of view about all the things so many of us take for granted when we get on a plane.”