Next week (November 29-30th), the kick-off meeting of the EMAPS European project (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science) will take place. We will work together with Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Technische Universität Dortmund, Digital Methods Initiative – University of Amsterdam, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po), The Young Foundation – UK for the next three years in observing trough the Internet two main socio-technical controversies climate change and life expectancy.  More precisely, the aim of EMAPS, in the domain of science-society interactions, is to get a better understanding of whether the web can provide a meaningful equipment to produce an enhanced interest of a wider public (i.e. scientists, journalists, activists, corporations or citizens…) in science and technology issues, not as receivers of information about end results of science, but as potential participants in science in the making.

Our role in this project is to conceive visualization tools able to depict the form of complex social phenomena assuming that understanding a phenomenon means understanding its form and understanding the form means, also, to see and to visualize its data and information patterns. The main effort is to reveal and dynamically describe connections between people, politics, information and scientific issues.

In the middle of these two kick-off meetings, on Monday the 28, I’ll be very pleased to talk about our work – and our vision/approach to visualization – at ENSCI Les Aterliers, where I’ll meet also some very good friends! The speech is scheduled in the evening, with the title “Macroscopes. Designing visual tools to help people understand and make sense of complex phenomena“. A title that I actually like very much!

We’re all very excited at DensityDesign for these new challenges: two great opportunities to improve our knowledge on the potential role of design in making the complexity of social phenomena visible, accessible and usable. It’s also a very positive sign, showing how very different disciplines are nowadays looking at visualization as a tool to improve their research/knowledge processes. Between infographics for the media-scape and visualization for Business Intelligence and fast analytics there is a huge territory to be explored, an extension of the scientific visualization domain where understanding is really the first goal: (economic) performances and the quest for attractive and glittering pictures only come after, if any. In this territory we believe designers have a fundamental role to play.

We’ll try to keep you updated about these new projects via our blog.

The lack of certainty is in fact a distinctive feature of our contemporary society: the variable economic trends, the unstable work dynamics, the commodification of job and the environmental issues are only few agents of uncertainty.

The educational purpose is to teach how to observe, understand and let others see what we have understood. The aim of the project is to facilitate policy makers and citizens in making more conscious decisions.

The first exercise of the course focused on the visualization of statistical data from official sources (e.g. ISTAT, the Italian National Institute of Statistics). The students (which were divided in groups and given a sub-theme each) had to both visualize this data and to create a system map which represents actor, relations and flows. You can see the results of their work on flickr!

The old blog posts will be online as soon as we complete the mass import. Thank you for waiting!

On July 6, 8 and 9 Map Fest takes place at Mediamatic. Map Fest brings together professionals, techies, amateur enthusiasts and artists, to explore, create, define and oppose maps.

We start with an evening on Mapping for Change with Wietske Maas, Christian Nold, Malkit Shoshan and Annelys de Vet.

It’s very good to see the increasing production of ‘subjective maps’: is cartography, after the digital era, seeking for new point of views, new dimensions to focus?

Read the article and navigate the map

Stay tuned!