Design Observer, January 2025
Visualization might seem too basic for a show about design and all it’s facets and futures, but these designers speak to more than just visualization’s face value. Professor and Chair of the department of Art + Design at Northeastern University, Dietmar Offenhuber, spoke about his new book, Autographic Design: the Matter of Data in a Self-inscribing World, which looks at practices of trace making as methodologies of information: “In the world of data, we have very unambiguous assignments, symbolic assignments of information and then in visualization we also used the same kind of formal methods to represent this. But traces don’t represent anything. They just present themselves. And when you try to understand what’s going on with traces around you, you’re always building a story.”
And Paolo Ciuccarelli spoke about the work he oversees as Founding Director of The Center for Design and Professor of Design at Northeastern University using data and transcribing it visually to open conversations between different groups of people using design as facilitation: “When you go out of analysis and have other purposes — so you want to communicate with data, you want to explain something to data, or you want to bring some scientific evidence to non-experts, for example, to the public, engage the public with something that is happening … That’s when analytical tools or analytical methods to visualize data doesn’t really help. And you have to figure out other ways to transform data so that they make sense for these other stakeholders, these other uses and these other purposes. That’s where we, I think, have a role as designers.”
