The listener (in fables or music) or the observer (in cinema and theater) plays a fundamental role in the narration process. The narrator evokes whereas the observer interprets through his imaginary. The more qualitative is the narrator evocation, the more the observer becomes co-author of the story.

In the visualization of complex networks, the designer should use a narrative mode of though, giving to the audience a good story more than a sound argument. As the movie director, the designer aim to choose the visualization that more preserves the complexity of the environment. As a result he takes a political stance: he directs actors (the elements of a system), he decides the light design (the choice of the elements to visualize), the set designs (the imagery to evoke), the different optical lens (the power of focusing) and most important, the critical point of view of the camera (intentionality).

We will present our research in the visualization of complex systems. The paper “Tell them anything but the truth: they will find their own. How we visualize the map of the future with respect to the audience of our story” focuses on the emerging need for a narrative approach for the understanding of complex networks. We consider narrations as tools with the paramount function of myths <to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience>.

We are proud to present it at the Arts | Humanities | Complex Networks — a Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci 2010 taking place at BarabásiLab — Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University in Boston, MA, on Monday, May 10, 2010.

See you there!

Complexity is a journey to infinity, and beyond! (© 1995, Buzz Lightyear) therefore the story we decided to tell in Como begins from the universe, and goes through the stars and planets, down to Density-Earth, a great place where statistics become information aesthetics, visualizations reveal ‘big pictures’ and potatoes are in fact big problems to solve.
What?!
Seriously, it’s easier if you look at the presentation up here and read the story we’re glad to spread.

If you’d like to watch the official video recording of the evening (and you understand italian), play it below.
For the english-subtitled version, check it out in the next few days.

like making a movie building this perfomances took hundreds (mmm just some to be honest) smart collaborators:
Screenplay – Paolo ciuccarelli
Additional screenplay – Donato Ricci
Concept – Michele Graffieti
Drawings – Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Storyboard Artist – Michele Graffieti
Animation - Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Coordinator – Mario Porpora, Donato Ricci
Flashman – Mario Porpora
Title Designer - Michele Graffieti
Text editing - Eileen Bernardi, Lorenzo Fernandez
Catering – Giorgio Caviglia, Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora

Throughout the centuries cities have been constantly changing, together with their image, their imageability. Therefore their graphic representations must be constantly ‘adapted’ to those changes too.

Classic cartography deals with the topographic aspects of the cities, without explaining what happens inside them, describing their elements, whereas recent technological approaches (MIT Senseable City above all) are using the city as a data to analyse, elaborating flows, activities, habits, offering new images of it, but somehow discarding any cultural aspect of the city.

During the middle age, cartography was a way of conveying sense, maps were not so closely linked to the territory, they were most likely a tool for understanding a vision of the world. Some city maps were only a symbolical artefact, people didn’t use them to find their bearings; sometimes map-makers hardly knew the mapped city itself. They were conscious of the meaning of the city, that was enough.

“To ask for a map is to say, Tell me a story” said Peter Turchi.
It’s only a matter of deciding which story to tell: design is choice.

My PhD research aims to identify new ways of looking at the city, in order to find a graphic language that can show cultural aspects, telling a different story about the city, showing its sense, its values, its history.
A kind of archeology of sense.

[...] So we are predisposed to trust arguments about the safety of nanotechnology, for example, if they are put forward by people of the same social class or of similar political leanings to us, and predisposed to reject arguments put forward by people whose values we reject – regardless of any views we may previously have held on the issue. Unfortunately, that bias won’t necessarily lead to the best choice, so the idea that simply distributing accurate information is the best way to get people to make informed decisions is flawed: people will reject it if it isn’t presented to them by people they feel sympathetic to. Officials or campaigners have to display a plurality of cultural leanings if they want to reach out to as many people as possible.

Changing our decision-making process to enable us to make better choices will not be straightforward. Emotion plays a powerful role in the process, so when we’re feeling fearful or insecure, statistics wither in the face of millennia of evolutionary adaptation.

This has led Slovic to suggest we need to imbue statistics with more emotional significance so that we take them to heart. “We learn how to deal with numbers from a young age as cold or abstract entities – to read them, add them, multiply them – but we don’t learn to think about how they represent reality in a way that conveys feeling and meaning. We need to think how to teach people to step away from their intuitive response, which is insensitive to magnitude, and think more carefully about what numbers represent.” [...]

the full article is available here.

HANDLING CHANGES THROUGH DIAGRAMS
To change towards a more sustainable development could means to make decisions not only with a systemic approach, but also to be able to decide in the right time: the density. It seems that, when the discipline of Design integrate a systemic approach with the competences of designers in visualization, it can cope with dense situations, providing effective artefacts – diagrams – to improve the decision process and making profit from the richness of complexity. The prior findings of the Complexity Science are here assumed as a theoretical framework to have an interpretative model on how the knowledge about systems could be organized and depicted. Three tools to produce effective diagrams, framing, graining and scaling are here discussed though six case studies.

Have a look

Have a look at the presentation

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since understanding is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience. In this context, there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience. Here, we can only know the past through its manifestation in the present.
by P. Eisenman

“In architecture the diagram is historically understood in two ways: as an explanatory or analytical device and as a generative device. Although it is often argued that the diagram is a postrepresentational form, in instances of explanation and analysis the diagram is a form of representation. In an analytical role, the diagram represents in a different way from a sketch or a plan of a building. For example a diagram attempts to uncover latent structures of organization, like the nine-square, even though it is not a conventional structure itself. As a generative device in a process of design the diagram is also a form of representation. But unlike traditional forms of representation, the diagram as a generator is a mediation between a palpable object, a real building, and what can be called architecture’s interiority.” (Eisenman 1999, Diagram Diaries)

This is not an argument against calculation, but a justification for why formal models will always have to be supplemented by narratives which make the limits of the model explicit. At the same time, the narrative models are also limited to a certain perspective. It can thus be argued that there is an irreducible ethical component to our understanding of complexity. We have to accept the responsibility for our models although we know they are flawed. When dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination.

(From Paul Cilliers’ Abstract presented at The first World Knowledge Dialogue Symposium)

DRM research shows how research in design can be an effective tool in producing innovation in many strategic fields in the national system, but in general also for contemporary economies, beyond the common stereotypes which accompany the view of this discipline. This awareness must guide the actors of research and the institutions they must sustain in order to enter a more structured course of actions, most of all integrated at an international level. A DRM platform extended to Europe can certainly be a useful tool in increasing this awareness.

The aim of the DRM research is to map the experiences of design research in Italy.
It also aim at:
- Identifying the peculiarities of national design research contexts
- Developing strategies for future researches based on the described framework
- Producing a “visibility” tool for the national university system
- Awakening the Institutions about capacities of design research for participating to the development of the Country.
Furthermore the objective is to build a story in images through commented infographic maps, which has become the main tool for visually representing results, creating a visual reading trough a series of interpretive, comparative and indexing maps able to synthesise and represent complex information, valorizing the information and facilitating an immediate but detailed reading.

The design research map will be presented at the International Conference “Changing the Change” in Turin on July 2008, as part of events planned for “Torino 2008 World Design Capital“.

The promoters of the initiative are:
CDD | Coordinamento Nazionale dei Dottorati di Design – Association of Design Ph.D. Schools in Italy;
CPD | Conferenza dei Presidi delle Facoltà di Design e dei presidenti di corso di studi delle classi di disegno industriale e design – Association of Design Faculties and Degree programs in Italy;
SDI | Sistema Design Italia – Rete nazionale di agenzie universitarie per la ricerca in design – Network of ten academic design research agencies.
Sponsored by the Design Faculty and INDACO Department of Politecnico di Milano.

The full PDF is avaible here

The suggestion by IXDA forum about basic user interaction design concepts gives us opportunity to make clear an intrinsic paradigm to complexity.

As in, if you can accurately predict what’s going to happen next in a System, it’s because the Action you’re taking is understandable, clear, logical and above all brings ameliorations to the main subject. If you can accurately predict what’s next, It means the System has high ameliorability.
If you can’t accurately predict what’s next, the System has low improvement perspectives.

Thus, Predictability derives from the Actions you’ve chosen to improve on going System and how many data you collected to draw it are relevant choices. However, collecting data and selecting Actions moments are going to be a background where develop tangible solutions, just before and after system visualizing process. Inside both, we might understand some emerging questions.

It’d be a right thesis, in fact according with Ben Fry (2008), the most important part of

“[...] understanding data is identifying the question that you want to answer. Rather than thinking about the data that was collected, think about how it will be used and work backward to what was collected. You collect data because you want to know something about it. I you don’t really know why you’re collecting it, you’re just hoarding it.”

In conclusion, predictability derives from past data still working in the form of governmental statistics, demographical reports, corporation quality manuals, etc. They’re getting us as information as possible to become new topical visualizations to builds ameliorations in order to the society.

So, let’s plan our future.