What is Ushahidi Crisis Map?

Ushahidi Crisis Map in brief

Ushahidi Crisis Map is a design language that deliberately looks rushed, because the thing it recreates was rushed. Ushahidi means testimony in Swahili, and the original website was built in January 2008, only days into the post-election violence in Kenya, by a small group of Kenyan bloggers and developers who wanted anyone with a phone to be able to text a report onto a public map.

The visual recipe is the plain web of the time. The page sits on the browser's default white, with a fixed-width table centered in the window. At the top is a hand-painted Kenyan flag banner with wobbly stencil lettering. Below it, a map carries two kinds of pin: dark red for reports of violence and deep green for reports of peace and mediation. Body copy is small Verdana, set in simple lists and tables with thin lines.

The style values the content of the reports over the frame around them. There is almost no decoration, no brand polish, and no attempt to look professional. That roughness is the point: it signals that the people who made it cared about whether reports were arriving, not whether the page looked good. The result is an unusually honest aesthetic, a design that tells you what it was for.

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Where does Ushahidi Crisis Map come from?

The source for this system is the original ushahidi.com launch build of January to February 2008, in Nairobi. Kenya had just held a disputed presidential election in late December 2007, and violence followed. Mainstream media coverage was limited, and information moved through text messages, blogs and word of mouth. In that moment, a few people with web skills saw that scattered reports could be gathered, verified and plotted so that patterns became visible.

The people behind the first build are well known in the technology and civic communities of East Africa. Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had been collecting reports of the violence on her blog and publicly asked whether someone could build a way to map them. Erik Hersman, a technologist and blogger, and Juliana Rotich and David Kobia, both developers, were among those who answered. Within days they had a working site that accepted reports from the public and displayed them on a map. The speed of that response is part of what the design records.

The approach came to be known as crisis mapping, a practice built on SMS-based citizen reporting and open-source civic technology. Instead of waiting for official sources, ordinary people supplied observations and the map made them legible. The software was later released as an open-source platform that others could deploy elsewhere, and the name Ushahidi became associated with a style of civic technology that is collaborative, low-cost and willing to work in public before it is perfect.

The look reflects the conditions of that moment. The page is built from a plain table because tables were the fastest layout tool available. The homemade flag banner was something a developer could do in an evening. The fonts are those already on most computers, and the colors are limited to what the map needs: red, green and white. Later versions of the project became more polished, but this system preserves the first build, where a lack of resources produced a style that is now readable as a statement about priorities.

What defines the Ushahidi Crisis Map look?

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Who shaped Ushahidi Crisis Map?

How do you use Ushahidi Crisis Map today?

For slides, this style suits talks about civic technology, humanitarian response, journalism and open data. A cover can be a white page with a roughly painted banner and a title in plain type. Content slides work as simple tables and lists with thin lines. Data slides should use red and green sparingly as category markers, with small, readable text, so the audience feels they are looking at real records rather than a polished infographic.

For web and app interfaces, it fits reporting tools, community maps, incident trackers, citizen science projects, mutual-aid boards and any product where the contributions of many people are the main content. A map with two or three pin types, a list of submissions in a table, and a simple form are enough. The interface should stay plain and fast-loading, and should resist the temptation to add decoration that would suggest a corporation is speaking.

For editorial and marketing work, it works well for documentary features, nonprofit reports, anniversary retrospectives and pieces about early internet activism. The deliberate roughness lends authenticity. Use a short banner at the top, a few columns of small type, and the occasional pin graphic. Keep photography documentary and uncropped, and let the titles be direct and factual.

A common mistake is to polish it. Rounded cards, soft shadows, a modern type scale and brand gradients turn it into a generic dashboard and erase the point. The opposite mistake is parody: exaggerating the roughness into a joke disrespects the seriousness of the subject. The right balance is plain and sincere, where the structure is simple, the colors are limited to what the content needs, and every element earns its place.

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Ushahidi Crisis Map — FAQ