Design for Emergency: An Open Platform to Design and Implement User-Centered Solutions in the COVID-19 Pandemic

As a consequence of the lockdown enforced to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, people found themselves in a state of social isolation, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Design for Emergency is a data and design open platform launched to ideate and develop user-centered solutions addressing people’s needs and emotions during and after the lockdown. The project is made of four stages: data collection, data analysis & visualization, design, and implementation. The initiative started in Italy, but it soon became global, extending to 11 countries in three continents. As a result, we collected and visualized data about people’s experiences during the pandemic at a global level. Our ideas platform, still growing, includes 36 seed ideas of solutions helping individuals and communities cope with the pandemic. Ideas are openly available for development by anyone, and some of them are currently being implemented. This initiative can be used as a reference and a pilot project to create a framework for designing in situations of uncertainty, emergency, or crisis, where design can quickly discover and address emerging feelings and needs

Ethnographic approach to design knowledge. Dialogue and participation as discovery tools within complex knowledge contexts

The following paper explores two main concepts: a) the ethnography as a thick and qualitative observation method, which refers to an active interpretation of the traditional ethnography by the communication design research mindset; b) the definition of design knowledge space, as extended boundaries for the physical place of design activities. In the paper we introduce the interpretation of ethnographic plan as a tool for communication epistemology and as a relevant research tool for the understanding and interaction with high complexity knowledge contexts. Ethnography has been practiced within design organizations aiming to provide remarks and insights about knowledge management systems within knowledge intensive organizations. We describe ethnography structure, tools, data analysis and interpretation techniques. For communication design practice, the field research is not considered merely as a techniques toolbox that have been borrowed from social sciences; design rhetoric refers to the major purpose of design thinking to act transformations in the observed contexts; ethnography is a way to face problem setting through research tools that consider observation and dialogue as the necessary design premise

Designing diagrams for social issues

Emerging approaches in social sciences and new media studies involve inquiry into social issues via the web. By collecting, analysing and visualising digital traces (i.e. posts, tweets, comments), a “issue map” can be created in order to make visible and understandable the network of the actors involved and their position in any public debate. Drawing on experiences gathered during a European project, we identified a two-phases-approach for the creation of issue maps. In the two phases - exploration and communication - visualisations play a key role, with two different connotations: in the first, they act as analytical devices used by researchers. In the second, they become communicative artefacts for a larger public. In this paper, we describe how we defined this approach, outlining the theoretical background and its connections with communication design. We highlight the main criticalities found in designing the issue maps before finally presenting our results

Network Shapes Design Activities. ICT Supporting Open and Shared Design Processes

The network paradigm refers to individuals as being continually involved in processes of sharing and being able to organize into creative communities of practice and knowledge. Some of these communities are developing and act creatively in the digital spaces of the net. They explore and push forward the ICT technology boundaries: everyday we observe on the Internet flourishing sources and authorities, new ways to organize information and public heritage worked out by different people and organizations that show much more richness everyday and become more and more interesting. Current researches on “creativity support tools” investigate the creative process as situated cognition activity in physical and technological spaces made up of tools such as creativity labs for innovation and frameworks for knowledge intensive activities. (E.g. L3D lab in Chicago, Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany). Research is revealing that creativity spaces should be differently designed for each creative action, which manages a particular kind of knowledge and needs to be supported by specific tools. Design activity is linked to the design space in which it occurs. It is a knowledge transfer process based on tools, from pencil to cognitive maps: knowledge comes steadily into shape until it becomes a designed artifact. It is a creative and cooperative action itself, presenting the same attributes as network communities. The ongoing research is hosted at Politeca, a Design Knowledge Centre at Politecnico di Milano focusing on network tools placed into design spaces, exploring which kind of support they can provide in design processes. The aim of research is to verify the need and test the use of tools in design contexts by two different design communities: the design student community (in faculty labs and courses) and the practitioner community (knowledge at work in different design teams). The paper describes the first phase of experiments. We study design activities “in situ” through participant observation methods derived from ethno methodology; we are creating a sort of “designers’ observatory” from which we will able to explore design processes from the point of view of both designers and researchers. In order to turn research findings into actions, forthcoming phases will verify emerging needs of knowledge by allowing designers to try out their work directly with a series of ICT design tools, and then providing for them a custom framework of tools to use. Network tools are technology to act on and experience knowledge, consistently with our ideas that sharing heightens knowledge and that design activity involves sharing expertise. Proceeding from this, we aim to shape toolkits for design activities in order to enhance creative sharing and to contribute to the development of a knowledge base for design made up of a dialogue between resources and experiences

Il ruolo dell'Information Visualization nella progettazione di interfacce per archivi digitali eterogenei

L'utilizzo di metodologie provenienti dalla information visualization nella progettazione di interfacce a collezioni digitali è una pratica che si sta consolidando negli ultimi anni (Hilton, 2010), con l'obiettivo di superare l'accesso puntuale ai singoli elementi a vantaggio di una visione complessiva dei contenuti. Allo stato attuale queste metodologie sono principalmente utilizzate per costruire singole viste sulle collezioni, concentrandosi su un'unica tipologia di elementi e progettando un'interfaccia che ne rispecchi le caratte-ristiche. Nel caso studio presentato, l'archivio Baldessari, si mostrano le potenzialità della information visualization non solo per costruire singole viste, ma anche e soprattutto nella progettazione di un lin-guaggio visuale coerente che permetta la fruizione unitaria di elementi tra loro eterogenei

Visual Geolocations. Repurposing online data to design alternative views

Data produced by humans and machines is more and more heterogeneous, visual, and location based. This availability inspired in the last years a number of reactions from researchers, designers, and artists that, using different visual manipulations techniques, have attempted at repurposing this material to add meaning and design new perspectives with specific intentions. Three different approaches are described here: the design of interfaces for exploring satellite footage in novel ways, the analysis of urban esthetics through the visual manipulation of collections of user-generated contents, and the enrichment of geo-based datasets with the selection and rearrangement of web imagery

Meta-design in the complexity of global challenges

A growing sense of crisis in the world, manifest in effects of climate change, depletion of living species, exhaustion of vital resources, extermination of indigenous peoples, disparity of wealth and privilege, a persistent rise of autocracy and demise of democracy — these all compound the urgency of asking what role design and designers must have in addressing these failures to account for the basic needs and rights of all humans, all species, and the environment. Should we reform design practices or is there a meta conceptual level within which we can better understand, evolve, and apply design principles? What are the limitations and risks of design as an increasingly popular practice? Where and when can the talents and skills of designers and the effects of design processes be more effectively applied? Who participates, and how, as the interconnectedness of our individual lives with and across social, biological, cultural, and political systems becomes more apparent? To what extent do design practitioners consider its consequences, intended and unintended

Visual Monitoring of Complex Algorithms

Purchases, conversations, access to information, music and movies: more and more of our online life is mediated by complex algorithms that are designed to make the experience of the Web customized and more “personal”. These algorithms can process an amount of heterogeneous data that would take enormous resources for the human mind to cope with, and find valuable patterns in it. Their use is not limited to our online experience as similar algorithms have been also implemented, for example, to inform policymakers: suggesting where to deploy police forces around the urban context, assessing criminality risk scores of offenders, or allocating high school students to the most suited school. While the consequences of the decisions made by algorithms have a great impact on people’s lives, the way they are built and designed makes them de facto “black boxes”: a series of legal and technical barriers prevents from accessing and understanding how a certain input influences a given output. Overseeing their decision processes becomes then of the utmost importance. This paper argues that visualizations can become a powerful tool to monitor algorithms and make their complexity accessible and usable by visually showing the relation between the inputs and the outputs in a manner that mimics an observational study approach. The paper analyzes a case study developed as an experiment to test opportunities and criticalities in using visualization to represent the presence and the activity of algorithms. This represents a shift from the main purpose of visualizations and Data Visualization in general: since its strong suit is to support human decision- making processes by transforming data into knowledge, the substitution of people by machines in this activity seems to make visualizations obsolete. A computer doesn’t need to “see” the data to make a decision – or at least not in the same way as people do – no matter how multidimensional and hetero- geneous the data is. With the diffusion of algorithms, the need to inspect their accountability and performance will simply move visualizations at a later stage. From a decision-making tool visualization becomes a monitoring and awareness tool

Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when