Products of Slavery Visualisation

It's not just trainers and t-shirts - over 120 types of products in 58 countries are made using forced or child labour. Products of Slavery, our new data visualisation for Anti-Slavery International, shows this clearly.

Products of Slavery is a data visualisation website about forced labour and child labour, also known as modern slavery, in the supply chain of many consumer goods. Tactical Studios, Tactical Tech's information design project, was commissioned to do this work by Anti-Slavery International. The site is being launched by Anti-Slavery International to mark the UK's first Anti-Slavery Day on Monday 18 October 2010.

Visitors to the Products of Slavery website can explore maps, charts and other interactive displays about forced labour and child labour used to make 122 different products in 58 countries. The data visualisation reveals vital information about the origins of these products, whose journey to the supermarket shelves is usually so well concealed in today's globalised economy. 

Data about modern slavery is hard to get at. We started with a 194-page report with over 2000 references written by the United States Department of Labor about products manufactured using forced labour. We have tried to turn this data and its sources into something that quickly shows the scale of modern slavery in supply chains, whilst enabling visitors to dig deep if they want to. We have researched over 600 quick facts about the social conditions that the products are made in; these serve as jump-off points to the original sources used by the Department of Labor.

Visitors to the website can participate in Anti-Slavery International's Slavery and What We Buy campaign by tweeting the short facts, from the website, across their networks. This may help raise awareness about the scale of slavery and motivate people to use their consumer power to pressure companies to eradicate forced labour and child labour in their supply chains.

This is the second production for Anti-Slavery International done by our Tactical Studios project in association with MediaShala, a design group based at the National Institute for Design in Ahmedabad, India. In 2009, we collaborated to create the Products of Slavery info-graphic (pdf 745 KB), which was distributed in poster form to over 3000 of Anti-Slavery International's supporters.