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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 composed of four steps: Data collection, data analysis & visualization, design, and implementation. The initiative was launched in Italy, but it soon became global, covering 11 countries in three continents. As a result, data about people's experiences during the pandemic have been collected and visualized at a global level. The ideas repository, still growing, includes 36 seed ideas of solutions helping individuals and communities to cope with the pandemic. Ideas are openly available for development, 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 under uncertain conditions and in situations of emergency, or crisis, where design can quickly discover and address emerging feelings and needs. © 2020 Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos. All rights reserved.

Design (research) has a natural tendency toward disciplinary promiscuity: it is the inevitable consequence of its interdisciplinary nature (Friedman, 2003). But the farther and deeper it goes in exploring and weaving new connections and relationships, the more its essence must be clear and remain solid. Capturing and understanding the interconnected nature of design is thus crucial for interdisciplinary design research. Three initiatives have been activated at the Center for Design (Northeastern University), to ground the mission of fostering interdisciplinary design research: (a) observe and understand the status and the evolution of design as a discipline and a practice through a Design Observatory (DO); (b) catalyze design forces around a current global-social issue and create the conditions for them to learn and act through the Design for Emergency open platform (Colombo & Ciuccarelli, 2020); (c) challenge the innate promiscuity of design by exploring/(bed)testing new potential interdisciplinary relationships though a series of transdisciplinary conversations1. This article refers mainly to the DO initiative, assuming that we need to observe, represent, share, and discuss what we see when we look at design, before — and so we can — carry it forward.

Water distribution systems are undergoing a process of intensive digitalization, adopting networked devices for monitoring and control. While this transition improves efficiency and reliability, these infrastructures are increasingly exposed to cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks engender anomalous system behaviors which can be detected by data-driven algorithms monitoring sensors readings to disclose the presence of potential threats. At the same time, the use of sonification in real time process monitoring has grown in importance as a valid alternative to avoid information overload and allowing peripheral monitoring. Our project aims to design a sonification system allowing human operators to take better decisions on anomalous behavior while occupied in other (mainly visual) tasks. Using a state-of-the-art detection algorithm and data sets from the Battle of the Attack Detection Algorithms, a series of sonification prototypes were designed and tested in the real world. This paper illustrates the design process and the experimental data collected, as well results and plans for future steps.

International audience; 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.

Data sonification is a practice for conducting scientific analysis through the use of sound to represent data. It is now transitioning to a practice for communicating and reaching wider publics by expanding the range of languages and senses for understanding complexity in data-intensive societies. Communicating to wider publics, though, requires that authors intentionally shape sonification in ways that consider the goals and contexts in which publics relate. It requires a specific set of knowledge and skills that design as a discipline could provide. In this article, we interpret five recent sonification projects and locate them on a scale of intentionality in how authors communicate socially relevant issues to publics.

The authors' CitySensing system captures at places social media streams and anonymous Call Data Records (CDR) during city-scale events. It semantically annotates the social media streams before fusing it with privacy-preserving aggregates of CDR. The result is analysed and repurposed to feed a public installation where visual story telling assumes a leading role in allowing the audience to perceive emerging patterns and to observe their dynamics. The authors demonstrate the efficacy of the visualization on the real-world data of two editions of Milan Design Week. This article is part of a special issue on social multimedia and storytelling.

Streams of information flow through our cities thanks to: their progressive instrumentation with diverse sensors, a wide adoption of smart phones and social networks, and a growing open release of datasets. City Data Fusion project investigates techniques to visualise the pulse of our cities in real-time by fusing and making sense of all those information flows. It exploits visual data analytics, semantic technologies, and streaming databases. In this poster, we offer insights on City Sensing: an early result of City Data Fusion that allows to visually analyse city scale events such as Milano Design Week.

In this chapter, we reflect upon how the urban experience is nowadays affected by data produced through interconnected, digital ecosystems such as the user-generated content on social media. We will present the scientific literature related to studies, research projects, and commercial platforms that use geo-located social mining techniques to extract urban knowledge. We will also analyze the state of the art in this thematic field and identify opportunities for further investigation.

In this chapter, we review the fast-expanding and multi-faceted classes of geo-referenced data visualization. By analyzing and interpreting existing projects based on static, motion graphics, and interactive visualizations of geographical information, we have built a taxonomy that crosses and groups the selected cases according to several classes of variables. The chapter presents both how we selected, divided, interrelated, and organized the collected material and our interpretation of the taxonomy. The chapter ends with a presentation of the potentialities of the taxonomy.

In this chapter, we present our remarks on the design experiments we carried out and we illustrate how the possibilities of visualizing the data city offer a source of knowledge for urban planning and management that can help city stakeholders in important decisions. Some critical issues will also be addressed.

In this chapter, we present a series of design experiments conducted within the Telltale and Urban Sensing projects.

This paper describes the design of Knot, a digital tool for exploring historical social networks, developed within a multidisciplinary research context involving designers, humanities scholars and computer scientists. The goal of the tool is to provide scholars and researchers with an environment for exploring multi-dimensional and heterogeneous data, allowing them to discover and create explicit and implicit relationships between people, places and events. What distinguishes our approach to traditional network exploration and analysis is an emphasis on the construction of the network graph through the visual interface, rather than on its static observation. Knot aims to explore new opportunities for interface design and information visualization within the definition of novel research practices in the humanities, bringing together scholars, HCI, design, and computer science communities.

Digital archives metadata suggest a rich and complex system of relationships between the different properties of archived items, which is often not properly represented. Lomen is a research project aimed at exploiting the richness of digital archives, stitching up the relationships between entities and providing visual access to the system. This paper presents the design process used to create such visual access for architect Baldessari's historical archives. The research results in a digital platform that allows users to explore contents in a non-linear way, identifying patterns and fostering insight. The platform also aims at weaving together several levels of information through direct linking to archive entities such as projects, artifacts or individuals involved. Curators are also given the ability to elaborate theme-based paths, providing varied and unique entry points to the underlying data to users.

Manual analysis of security-related events is still a necessity to investigate non-trivial cyber attacks. This task is particularly hard when the events involve slow, stealthy and large-scale activities typical of the modern cybercriminals' strategy. In this regard, visualization tools can effectively help analysts in their investigations. In this paper, we present BURN, an interactive visualization tool for displaying autonomous systems exhibiting rogue activity that helps at finding misbehaving networks through visual and interactive exploration. Up to seven values are displayed in a single visual element, while avoiding cumbersome and confusing maps. To this end, animations and alpha channels are leveraged to create simple views that highlight relevant activity patterns. In addition, BURN incorporates a simple algorithm to identify migrations of nefarious services across autonomous systems, which can support, for instance, root-cause analysis and law enforcement investigations.

Social and Human Sciences have recently discovered the potential of a hybrid research process, where the specificity of design knowledge and the peculiarity of design thinking can be exploited. Two ongoing experiences demonstrate how - after a first stage where Communication Design has been placed at the end of a linear sequence from data to prototypes - a more integrated and collaborative research process can be established, building on the proclivity of humanities scholars to mingle thinking and making. As the availability of digital data increases and public communication and civic engagement becomes inevitable, the relationship between sciences and Communication Design emerges as a fundamental yet critical marriage. In our experience the soft sciences that embraced digital technologies with a strong interest in complexity and networks —as Digital Humanities and Computational Sociology— are the most promising areas for experimenting with this recent form of disciplinary promiscuity. The contribution of Communication (and Information) Design is twofold: on one hand it can support the exploration of the often dark and uncertain matter of historical data and digital traces, and let the patterns emerge; on the other hand Communication and Information Design can help bringing complex scientific issues into the hands of non-expert stakeholders: people that are neither expert of the domain of interest nor familiar with the very nature, the structure and the dynamics of complexity.

In this paper we suggest a different approach that considers visualizations in the wider domain of communication and defines a model capable of taking into account the context in which visualizations act as communication tools. In this perspective we consider visualizations as transformation processes within the Data-Information-Knowledge (DIK) continuum. In the paper we discuss the continuum, and apply the transformation process model to the main disciplines of visualization. Visualizations represent powerful cognitive tools that surround our everyday life [1]. By doing this we are able to think about visualization from a multidisciplinary perspective, exploring the role of visualizations in design practice, as artifacts that are used in facing problems of various degrees of complexity and nature. The contribution of the model is mainly addressed to orientate and nurture the reflective practice and to formalize the strategic more than the technical role of visualizations in the design discipline.

This poster presents the development of DesignNet, a knowledge-based project to the online digital display, retrieval and archiving of rich media resources for industrial design education and research. The project addresses the needs of end-users (teachers and students) and content providers interacting with the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano.