Visualising Controversies with BA UXD
For the 21/22 winter semester on BA UXD I designed and taught a unit on Interactive Data Visualisation. The topics included Interactive data visualisations, controversy mapping, digital methods and internet health.
We started with a series of mini-briefs that introduced methods for interrogating datasets and sketching out simple visualisation ideas. You can also read the full unit guide.
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.
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.