Today’s world demands for quick decision making in increasing complex situations and problematic contexts. Therefore we need to act quickly in order to consciously take decisions and make effective changes happen without ignoring every possible implications and consequences (in society, environment…) produced by those changes.

In this framework, communication design can be a powerful tool to represent, hence understand, the complexity of the system where we aim to act. That’s why we named the course “Density: communication and complexity”: we intended to experiment with the tools of communication design making complex system understandable, accessible and modifiable. Particular attention was given to collective participative decision making, in which every actor of a system is an active contributor to decisions and changes.

The aim of the first part of the course was to represent a selected system, testing the combination of notational language, maps, diagrams, graphs and infographics.

In the second part students had the opportunity to design a communication project addressed to the support and the initialization of the hypothesized change.