Visualising Controversies with BA UXD (21/22)

Topics

• Interactive Data Visualisation
• Controversy Mapping
• Digital Methods
• Internet Health

For the 21/22 winter semester on BA UXD I designed and taught a unit on Interactive Data Visualisation. I choose to model this on a unit taught by the Density Design Lab at Politecnico Di Milano. They wrote an excellent paper called Teaching the critical role of designers in the data society: the DensityDesign approach, which laid out the theoretical and practical foundations of the teaching.

Teaching the critical role of designers in the data society: the DensityDesign approach. Mauri, Michele & Colombo, Gabriele & Briones, Angeles & Ciuccarelli, Paolo. (2019). 10.21606/learnxdesign.2019.12046.

At the core is a method created by Bruno Latour called Controversy Mapping as a way to help students understand, observe and describe socio-technical debates. It has since been used, mostly in Science and Technology Studies as a framework for exploring and visualising complexity.

Designing Controversies and Their Publics. Venturini, Tommaso & Ricci, Donato & Mauri, Michele & Kimbell, Lucy & Meunier, Axel. (2015). Design Issues. 31. 74–87. 10.1162/DESI_a_00340

We started with a series of mini-briefs that introduced methods for interrogating datasets and sketching out simple visualisation ideas.

Mini-briefs - Exploring datasets