Another year, another wave of inventive, participatory, and thought-provoking dataviz installations from the students. This year's projects tackled everything from holiday travel habits to cosmetic surgery, social media addiction, and social justice, all brought to life through hands-on, interactive displays that invited the entire school community to become part of the data. Read on to discover what our students found out, and how they found it out.
How far do EJCAM students travel for their holidays?
What is the furthest distance an EJCAM student has ever travelled from France for a holiday? That was the central question behind one of this year's most visually striking installations. The students printed a large world map and placed it at the centre of their display, surrounded by boxes of coloured strings, grey for plane, white for car, red for train, and blue for boat. Participants chose a string corresponding to their mode of transport, pinned one end to their holiday destination on the map, and threaded the other through a hole marking France as the shared point of departure. The resulting tangle of lines fanning outward across oceans and continents became a vivid, tactile picture of where EJCAM students go when they leave. Instructions were left on display throughout the week so that students could participate even in the team's absence. One thoughtful adaptation emerged mid-project: a dedicated corner was added for students who had never left France, so that no one was excluded from the conversation.
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Forty students participated. The dominant colour threading across the map was grey, 62.5% of participants travel by plane for their holidays. More surprising was the geographic ambition on display: 86.2% of participants preferred destinations outside Europe, with the Americas the most popular region at 30%, the furthest recorded journey being France to Florida. Africa came second at 19.4%, with France to Cape Town as the longest route. Surprisingly, many students were taking flights to destinations bordering France, places where train travel would be a less carbon-intensive alternative. The students saw their installation as an opportunity to highlight habits that, in the context of the climate crisis, need to change.
Have you ever experienced injustice?
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Few installations this year were as immediately arresting as this one. Built entirely from recycled materials: cardboard, plastic cups, wool, glue and assembled over more than three hours, the display asked a single, direct question in large handwritten letters posed inside a speech bubble:
"Have you ever experienced injustice?" A branching tree structure beneath it separated responses into two categories: sexism and racism, with further branches indicating where the injustice had taken place: at home, at school, in the street, at work, or within the family. Participants voted using small colour-coded scraps of paper, yellow for women and green for men, dropping them into the corresponding cups. The installation was set up in EJCAM's open common area, the space where students come to eat, drink coffee, and decompress, ensuring maximum footfall and visibility. |
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Alongside the voting mechanism, the display included the phone numbers for SOS Racisme and the national sexist violence helpline, on the grounds that victims often don't know where to turn, or have become so accustomed to these experiences that they no longer think to act. The results were striking. On the sexism side, 18 women participated and not a single man. All 18 reported having experienced sexism at school, at work, and in public spaces, while half had experienced it within their own families. The racism data showed broader participation across genders, with most incidents reported as occurring outside the home. What the project brought into sharp focus was not just the prevalence of these experiences, but the silence that so often surrounds them and the role all of us play, as bystanders, in either challenging or perpetuating that silence. |
How much time do EJCAM students really spend on social media?
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This project began with a statistic: according to the 2022 Médiamétrie Internet Report, French people between the ages of 15 and 24 spend an average of 2 hours and 19 minutes per day on social media, more than 60% of their total screen time. The students wondered whether EJCAM students, whose studies are built around media and digital communication, followed the national trend or exceeded it.
Their answer took the form of a cardboard computer. The screen, a large box covered in coloured paper displayed four usage categories represented as phone battery icons: 0 to 1 hour, 1 to 3 hours, 3 to 5 hours, and more than 5 hours. |
Below it sat a fully detailed cardboard keyboard, which served not just as decoration but as a voting station: tucked beneath the keys were colour-coded mini post-its in three colours corresponding to gender, which participants selected before placing them in their chosen usage bracket.
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After a week on display, 33 votes had been collected, 60% of them in the first two days. The post-its for the women's category ran out entirely and had to be restocked. The findings were unambiguous: EJCAM students spend considerably more time on social media than the national average for their age group. A combined 58% of participants reported spending more than 3 hours per day on the platforms. Women represented 70% of respondents and declared higher usage than men. The students suggested that their communications-focused curriculum which requires them to monitor trends, manage platforms, and collaborate digitally, likely amplifies their usage beyond what would be typical, on top of whatever personal use they engage in outside their studies. |
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Would you ever have cosmetic surgery?
Participants indicated a yes or no using coloured stickers placed along the axis, and those who answered yes were invited to mark the corresponding body silhouette to show which area they would consider changing.
Of 38 participants, 73.7% said no. The 26.3% who said yes were notably specific in their responses: the female silhouette gathered 25 annotations across areas including the nose, breasts, cheeks, hips, and knees, while the male silhouette received 13 annotations covering the chest, abdomen, eyebrows, and hair. The students observed that every body part indicated corresponded to a surgical rather than non-surgical procedure, meaning that those open to intervention were also, knowingly or not, expressing a willingness to accept higher medical risk. The project raised questions the installation itself could not fully answer: what motivates these choices, and how aware are people of the risks involved? |
Cosmetic surgery is a topic that few people feel comfortable discussing openly: for moral, religious, or personal reasons.
With global aesthetic procedures rising by over 11% in 2022, and France alone recording 320,000 surgical interventions in that year, the team felt the moment was right to ask the EJCAM community directly: would you ever consider going under the knife? Their installation was placed at the entrance to the school's main hall, high-visibility and impossible to ignore. Two printed silhouettes, one male and one female, were mounted on the wall on either side of a central horizontal axis bearing the question: "Do you think you would ever have cosmetic surgery?" 
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What a year. From cardboard computers to silhouettes covered in stickers, from strings pinned to world maps to cups filled with coloured paper, the 2023 cohort demonstrated once again that the most powerful data is data that people make together.
