The laboratory dealt with data and information visualization. The students were asked to design communication systems to take advantage of the disclosing of many archives and data sets of social relevance, in Italy and abroad.

A communication project begins with the building of information architecture and ends with the definition of access and interaction procedures through the development of prototypes. During the course we tested languages, environment and tools suitable to visualize data and information (e.g. Flash, Processing, Pure Data), with the aim to motivate the final users (the citizens) to access those archives and facilitate them to benefit from them.

The laboratory has been conceived in two parts plus a conclusion. In the first one we illustrated and tested some of the explorational and operational tools that are usually needed to manipulate data and information and to visualize them. The second part is dedicated to the design and prototyping. The final step consisted in spreading the outcome of the works on the net, which represented also the first evaluation of the communicative effectiveness of every projects.

Short bibliography

Brasioli A. (1997). Nomi segni cose. Libreria Editrice Il Leggio.
Card S. K., Mackinlay J. D., Shneiderman B. (1999). Readings in information visualization : using vision to think. San Francisco, Ca: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Corradi Fiumara G. (1998).Il processo metaforico, connessioni tra vita e linguaggio. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Huff D. (2007). Mentire con le statistiche (Ed. italiana a cura di Livraghi G. e Puglisi R.). Pescara: Monti & Ambrosini.
Klanten R. et al (2008). Data flow : visualising information in graphic design. Berlin : Gestalten.
Marmo R., Valle M., Zannoni C., (2004). Introduzione alla visualizzazione scientifica. Il Rostro.
Rosati L. (2007). Architettura dell’Informazione. Milano: Apogeo.
Segaran T. (2009). Beautiful Data. The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions. Sebastopol, CA : O’Reilly.
Ware C. (2004). Information visualization : perception for design. San Francisco, CA : Morgan Kaufman.
Lakoff G., Johnson M. (2004). Metafora e vita quotidiana. Milano: Bompiani.

The following students partecipated to this year's course:

Lorenzo Ameri, Marco Bonfieni, Laura Cantadori, Prachi Chaudhari, Veronica Clarin, Paolo Curti, Monica Diani, Chiara Girardelli, Marco La Mantia, Matteo Orioli, Simone Paoli, Valerio Pellegrini, Fiona Pinto, Nicole Pozzobon, Marta Isabella Reina, Tommaso Renzini, Manuela Blanca Scarian, Benedetta Signaroldi, Laura Stefani, Gianvito Toscano, Luca Trinchero, Michel Tumani, Alessio Andrea Unfer, Santiago Villa, Annamaria Andrea Vitali, Riccardo Volpato, Esther Zanon