Design As Visualization

Who’s doing the seeing? And who’s doing the making? But also— who’s doing the act of putting that into the world and extending that out as something for other people to see?

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On this episode of Design As you’ll hear from:

Visualization might seem too basic for aa 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:

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:

Transcript

Lee Moreau Welcome to Design As a show that’s intended to speculate on the future design from a range of different perspectives. This season, we’re bringing you six new episodes with six new keywords to interrogate. In this episode, you’ll be hearing two different design voices speak to the idea of design as visualization. I’m Lee Moreau, host of the Features Archive from Design Observer, founding director of Other Tomorrows and Professor of Practice in design at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design, which hosted the 2024 Design Research Society annual conference earlier this summer. There I got the chance to sit down with various guests, leaders and speakers who were attending the conference, and we’ve compiled their voices into this episode about design as visualization. It’s a roundtable today in just two parts. On this episode, you’ll hear from Dietmar Offenhuber,

Dietmar Offenhuber We are used to talk about, you know, design as a language. We are used to talk about data as a form of text. But beyond these textual metaphors, you know, there’s also a physical dimension that is often overlooked in the discourse and that is very important. 

Lee Moreau And Paolo Ciuccarelli, 

Paolo Ciuccarelli For controversial and societal problems, you know, want to have data, but we want to make sure that multiple stakeholders can be part of the problem and the solution of the problems. 

Lee Moreau Visualization may be the most obvious thing to be talking about on a design podcast, but I think it’s important to talk about it in this conversation because it actually takes different dimensions in the work that we do at different times. So in some cases it’s the process, just the sense of awareness and engagement in the world around you and the sort of perception of visual features or visual phenomena that take place. And our role as designer is to pick up on those things and to see them and understand them and document perhaps retransmit them. In other cases, it is actually producing the content that’s meant to be consumed. It’s the interplay between observation and perception and creation and bringing things to life to tell a story that’s so powerful. And we hear a few different perspectives on this topic from this conversation of understanding who’s doing the seeing and who’s doing the making, but also who’s doing the act of putting that into the world and extending that out as something for other people to see. 

Lee Moreau I’m here with Dietmar Offenhuber at Northeastern’s Recording studio. It’s June 24th. Hi Dietmar, how are you doing? 

Dietmar Offenhuber Hey Lee I’m doing very well, thank you. 

Lee Moreau Well, Dietmar, I mean, in addition to directing traffic this morning, you’re also the professor and chair of the Department of Art and Design here at Northeastern. You also have a secondary appointment in the School of Public Policy, and I don’t know to what degree that’s getting folded into this whole thing, but this is there’s a lot going on. There’s sort of buzzy. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah. I mean, it’s the way Northeastern likes to do things, I would say. /laughs/. 

Lee Moreau And you’re —you have a panel discussion later this week? 

Dietmar Offenhuber I have, I have a book talk together with Catherine D’Ignazio on Thursday at lunch. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Dietmar Offenhuber And, yeah, it’s going to be amazing. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Dietmar Offenhuber To talk about our books. 

Lee Moreau Tell us a little bit more about your book. 

Dietmar Offenhuber So my book is called “Autographic Design”, with the subtitle: “The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World”, sounds a little bit mysterious, but it’s it’s ultimately about the connection between design and and information and our physical environment. Because in design theory, we often get carried away with very abstract systems, semiotic systems, science and language. You know, we we are used to talk about, you know, design as a language. We are used to talk about data as a form of text. But beyond these textual metaphors, you know, there’s also a physical dimension that is often overlooked in the discourse, and that is very important. And when, you know, in this book, I talk about practices of trace making and presenting evidence through traces. What is the rhetorics around that? What are the practices and the methods? How to activists, citizen scientists, environmental advocates and so on— how do you-how do they directly engage with their physical surroundings in order to visualize and present evidence and information? 

Lee Moreau And what would be an example of a project that would be included in your book? 

Dietmar Offenhuber I mean, one of the simplest examples, which is very in right now, almost like a global practice, which is started in New York as a as a practice of bicycle and pedestrian advocates around Clarence Eckerson, the street blocks, where these activists are constantly fighting for more space for cyclists and pedestrians and reclaiming space from, you know, the motorized traffic. And of course, they run against transportation planners who are backed up by, you know, mathematical models of how much space you need on the street in order to, you know, have a have have a, you know, traffic circulation system. And rather than basically having the discourse through these mathematical models, they go out after a snowstorm and take photos of the vehicle traces and they usually show that cars would need much less space if, you know, everyone would drive as carefully as after a snowstorm. And the beautiful thing is that you have even in very busy intersections you have all these patches where you still have pristine white snow that hasn’t been touched by anyone except, well, this could be a space for bicycles or for pedestrians or for a tree or something like that. And engaging directly with these physical traces, instead of switching to this kind of level of expert language and expert models, is, of course, also a strategy to to move the center of the discourse away from those domains where those experts are in charge and define the way how information is collected and presented to a different, more sensory space where now suddenly the experts have to explain. So like, you know, why-why can’t we, you know, do something here if you know that space is obviously more needed. 

Lee Moreau So it’s not so much about the kind of willful mark making as it is about recognizing and being comfortable and sensitive to the traces that life already produces as well. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah. And and I think that is a very important point to recognize the very, you know, a trace has many different stories and many different meanings. It’s not that kind of, you know, in the world of data, we have very unambiguous assignments, symbolic assignments of, you know, 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. So it’s it’s a kind of a different way of engaging. And it’s from that perspective, inherently relevant for visualization and for, you know, discourse around those issues. 

Lee Moreau You teach design and the book like this is actually probably about documenting things that are already taking place, many of which are happening by non designers. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah. 

Lee Moreau So can you talk about the audience for the book and maybe how you would frame it for a designer versus somebody who is does not have a design background? 

Dietmar Offenhuber Regardless of whether we talk about theory or, you know, pretty much any kind of conceptual engagement with design, it always has to start with practices — what what people are already doing. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Dietmar Offenhuber And today in your workshop, you had this discussion about AI, and you know that the answer to that question six months ago or three months ago would have been very different because the impact on those practices were, you know, different and still evolving. And I think engaging with with practices is very central. And like one special thing that I did in this book maybe was that I used, practical projects, art projects, exhibition projects, prototypes as a way of theorizing rather than as a way of presenting a final artifact. So, you know, they were presented at festivals and so on and, and exhibitions, but they were kind of deliberately small scale because they were really more experimental situations for me to have to figure something out, to figure out how people respond to this. And, and, and this is something that is important in education, I think as well. This kind of experimental approach that you, you know, go out and intervene, but you are doing it in a very reflective way. You’re trying to figure out what’s what’s what’s already there and and which things you can change. 

Lee Moreau So when you finish a book, a project like this, it gives you hopefully a moment to think about like, what’s the future of design? A sort of reflective moment. Where is your head at right now when you look out to the future, both as a chair of a department but also as a practitioner, what are you excited about or what’s in your mind related to the future of design? 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think in this case, my work as a department chair here is, is really challenging me because I see all these, you know, what-what students are doing, what Northeastern is experimenting with. We have a lot of very, very interdisciplinary students and they are, you know, sometimes struggling, sometimes really coming up with really very unique, you know, perspectives and projects and ways of doing things. So for me, I feel very comfortable with design being at a research university. You know, I have an art related background, but I also really enjoy this disconnection too, because—let’s let’s put it differently, a lot of people are talking right now about how most of the big issues that we are dealing with are in a way, design problems, not necessarily, that they, you know, can be addressed with a kind of rigorous formulaic design process, but that they require some kind of practical engagement that requires some back and forth, that they involve trying things out, they involve reflection. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Dietmar Offenhuber And this just, you know, immersing yourself in into a situation, into a messy situation and trying to figure it out. Not with a script that you cannot change, but by just kind of engaging with it and taking it a step at a time. This is very much what design research is about. And from that perspective, I totally agree that, you know, this is a methodology that is not limited to the design of furniture or— 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Dietmar Offenhuber —of posters. 

Lee Moreau And this sort of sea of ambiguity that we and students particularly they are finding themselves in. That’s a site of potential, right? I mean, 

Dietmar Offenhuber Absolutley. 

Lee Moreau There’s so much that can happen in that space. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah. And I mean, I think I was trained, so I was trained as an architect. And there you, you constantly have to struggle because, you know, a building has so many facets. You have, you know, people who do the plumbing, people who do the, you know, ventilation, and they all have a different idea of what the perfect house should look like. And they all say, the architect doesn’t understand any of that. So but the architect has to somehow synthesize all of that conflicting information that is not all or cannot always be reconciled. And this is very much what generally happens in design. And this is why the studio and this this experience is so important for our students because they have to figure out how to deal with conflicting feedback, conflicting information that when, you know, professor doesn’t, you know, tell you: Oh you need to do this, do this, this, this, and it’s going to be better, and then come back with that. They give you some feedback that maybe unexpected or, you know, that you may disagree with, but you still have to figure out how to integrate it right now. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Dietmar Offenhuber And I think that’s the skill. 

Lee Moreau That’s the magic. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Yeah. 

Lee Moreau Fantastic. Dietmar, thank you so much for taking time with us. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Thank you Lee. 

Lee Moreau This is wonderful and I look forward to seeing you out at the conference. 

Dietmar Offenhuber Absolutely, Thanks Lee.

Lee Moreau Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. Did you know the Design Observer is taking pictures? Here’s editor in chief Ellen McGirt. 

Ellen McGirt At the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, Design Observer has always been about community, and as a community we spend a lot of time thinking about the future and very specifically about how the practice of design imagines a better world. And that’s where everybody comes in and that’s where we need everybody. Over 20 years, the professional designers and journalists and experts in a variety of field have been so generous with their with their points of view, contributing to stories, pitching stories. So we typically welcome three types of contributors. There designers, the entire spectrum of what design can be; professional journalists who are focusing on business and design and education, justice and beyond; and book publishers and film festival producers. That’s a big part of what we cover. Everything from opinion pieces and personal essays to conversations between designers in different disciplines telling us more about how they work and how they collaborate and how they solve big problems. And I think too, what I’m really excited about is the the kinds of insights that younger and up and coming designers and thinkers are going to need to be able to navigate what’s coming in this crazy world. So pitch us, please. 

Lee Moreau To get involved in the conversation you can send pitches by going to Design Observer dot com and scrolling all the way down to the pitch us section. 

Lee Moreau I’m here with Paolo Ciuccarelli, at Northeastern’s recording studio here, it’s June 24th. You’re an architect and a communication designer. You’re also a professor here at Northeastern and the head of the Center for Design. Is that right? 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yes, correct.

Lee Moreau And you have a law— I mean, you doing all kinds of impressive stuff and you wrote a book as well before coming to Northeastern. So, I mean, between the professional work and the academic work, also in Milano, this is a culmination of many things it feels.

Paolo Ciuccarelli Wow, if you put it like that, I like it — that is a sure, and it’s I’ve I’ve been in this field now for 25, close to 30 years and, you know, crossing all different areas of design. So I started in product design when we built actually the design School and Polytechnic in Milano because I’m an architect, because design was not an option at the university level in Milano. So then when I graduated, I had the chance to be part of the group that set up the design school, and now it’s one of the biggest in terms of students in the world. And then, you know, we started with product design and then then we had some other courses, grad programs, and then eventually communication design became an option. And that’s what I wanted, always wanted to be, and culminating my two passions technology and visual communication, visual languages. So I found my home there. And then this became my first real home. And then I moved into data visualization design and did data visualization that I claimed to be my research, and now with this. 

Lee Moreau And you built a whole practice in that domain as well. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli First of all, I founded a research lab that still exist and Polytechnic in Milano in 2010, and it’s called the Density Design Research Lab, and it’s does research using design to transform data in, you know, many different ways, especially, you know, for controversial and societal problems, you know, when we have data but we want to make sure that multiple stakeholders can be part of the problem and the solution of the problem. So that’s the focus of that research. Love it and it’s something that I brought here. I think, you know, this experience. But here I also found a way at Northeastern being in the College of Arts, Media, Design together with architecture, music, theater to expand a little bit the focus beyond data visualization, visual languages, and to reconnect in a way to my roots as an architect, to start thinking about other modalities to transform data, for example, data sonification. So something that started actually in between Polytechnic and here when I was moving. And so we created that this data sonification archive that is probably the main resource now for anybody working in data sonification. And it gathered a kind of a community around it because he was in the middle of a transformation the field, so people used data sonification in the past for scientific analysis like astronomers always used data sonification. And on the other side you had data artists that were using sound as a way to express data in an artistic way. But there was nothing in the middle. I would say, same that happened with data visualization in a way. So design was-is was able and is able now with data sonification to create a space where you have you can serve different, you know, purposes and not just, you know, science and art. So there is a space in the middle that design can help populate with solutions that are intentionally designed to serve — serve customers and users for a  purpose within a certain context. So that’s something. 

Lee Moreau And how many pieces are in this or materials are in this archive? How large? 

Paolo Ciuccarelli More than 400 cases. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli We collect projects and and we have curated that and we have a whole set of meta data is available. You know, if you want to do some analysis and the number of papers that came out as an analysis of some areas of this website like, you know, all the astronomy cases are being analyzed and there is a paper published on nature astronomy about that. And so it’s a enables also as a base-knowledge base out of people to do some research on that. Yeah.

Lee Moreau I mean, this is an expansion of the way that we’ve traditionally understood what data does. Data is just like dumb stuff that piles up somewhere and you’re bringing it to life through all these various tools and, and creating a forum through which we can analyze this. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yeah. Yeah. The point is, analysis is one of the purposes and some probably is not the most interesting for us because one-on one side there are already a lot of different solutions that exist and a very powerful if you want to do analysis with data. What is more interesting is that when you go out of analysis and have other purposes: so you want to communicate with data, you want to, you know, 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 and like, you know, call it, for example. That’s when analytical tools or analytical methods to- 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. 

Lee Moreau Can you describe the role of the Center for Design in sort of pedagogical terms? Like what you are-how you bring that into the curriculum for teaching in a way that can engage both students, but also the faculty that are doing research projects. So it feels like a sort of expansion of the the role that the College of Arts Media Design had previously. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Well, the Center for Design has been conceived mostly as a as a research center. So originally actually, there was no no intention of would say no plan to really connect with the curriculum and the curricular activity. Then eventually what we discovered is that lot of students are interested and of course faculty as well, sometimes in doing research. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli So the role that now is playing is acting as a kind of an interface between the research activities that is, of course, important. Like, you know, we are in our one research university and students will love engaging with that kind of solving problems. And the research scale is different than, you know, the studio courses that you have. So I think now the Center, you know, we embrace that need that we saw emerging and then we are now trying to facilitate as much as possible this connection. So we connect to the curriculum in a way that can help students navigate through the research activity and to know to connected this connection, connecting this, this, this emerging need or will that we sow into with the research that is happening at the Center and beyond. So that’s, I think, the way we are now plugging into the curriculum. And we are also we will launch, in other news, next year in the fall, what we call student residencies. So if you are a student and you have an idea for a research project and that goes beyond what are your duties in the curriculum, you can apply for the fellowships, and so residency, you can stay at the center, you have your own seat, the table, and then you can get some mentorship and you can develop your project, your research project, with the help of the center and with a little money that you can use for, you know, buying materials or software, whatever you need. That is something that we will again facilitate the connection between. Students and research. 

Lee Moreau Kind of exciting stuff. As we think about the future, right, we’re looking out. What do you when you’re looking out, right, when you kind of take stock of where things are going, what are you excited about and or even concerned about when we think about design in the future? 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yeah, of course I have both concerns and excitement. Excitement come mainly from realizing that something that I’m dealing with in a sense, I think a lot of years as a constant, is a concept that actually inform it in a way my professional career in design, research and design, health, education, that is this idea of meta design is something and it has  origins in architecture, some connections with Italy, you know, it’s something that I always loved as an as an idea. And now what I see is that is becoming particularly relevant with the emerging technologies that are changing the way we design. Now more than ever, the idea of designers becoming meta designers, or this, this and this idea of designing on a different level. I think it’s becoming and will become more and more important. Meta design is essentials like that you don’t design the actual thing, so like you don’t do that specific project, but you design, say the rules and the like — yeah, let’s say the rules and the protocols to enable other designers to design with these other designers being human are not humans, meaning that the moment we have an algorithm that designs, then how this algorithm design should be designed. It might be by designer that does meta design. So that defines the rules and the constraints within which the algorithm or the designers will perform is the activity.

Lee Moreau That’s complex, but I’m with you. Yes. Okay. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Trust me. /laughs/. 

Lee Moreau Okay. /laughs/. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Now, that’s I think it’s it’s designing inthe relationship between part of processes or things. And that’s something that, you know, has the roots in the 60s actually in architecture where someone started to think about buildings, for example, as a relationship between spaces. And so they started to design those relationships as like, think about the diagram that connects to spaces, these blocks in some way. And then this diagram can be applied case by case and interpreted by the designer, the actual designer —in that moment and that context and that plays in a way. So this diagram will generate and produce a number of different design activations that are informed by the diagram. But they captured the local conditions and expressed that diagram that meta design in a specific way. But if you look at the results, you should be able to recognize-recognize this like relationship on the on the back. Something that I had tried to apply also to branding, it seems a little far, but I think it’s the same with branding. So you design, you know, some rules and, you know, core values, and then depending on the situation and the constant, then you iterate and you create this specific expression of this. So it’s like the genetic know components and then you put in action so that you have to recognize that all the entities are part of the same family. So you recognize the genomic commonalities, but then it’s every time different but similar, you know.

Lee Moreau So-so the more that we can increase in complexity, but then also we can multiply or or iterate at an exponential rate,. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yeah. 

Lee Moreau We require ways of thinking and conceiving of design, which is actually not so much material, but —

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yeah, yeah, definitely. 

Lee Moreau —contextual. Okay.

Paolo Ciuccarelli  And it has to do with complexity as a systemic thinking and systems design-design. It’s yeah, it’s about embracing complexity and start designing on that level. 

Lee Moreau Okay, that’s heady stuff, but that is where we’re going and maybe where we are right now, right? 

Paolo Ciuccarelli I think we need to be.  Because, you know, we need to drive the way things are designing, so not just designers, but also algorithms are designing. So we need to be able to go up in that system. And I think the only way to make that leap and, you know, embrace what I call at meta design. 

Lee Moreau Okay. Both exciting and scary, right? 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Yeah. And then the concern is a kind of connected, of course, because it’s it’s new in a way. So and that is a lot of uncertainty and it brings a lot of panic sometimes. But and also these concerns that come with the emerging technology themselves. So like, you know:biases, ethical problems, that’s something that we have to face now. And it’s challenging. 

Lee Moreau Paolo, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a super busy week, but thanks for making the time to talk to us. 

Paolo Ciuccarelli Thank you for having me. 

Lee Moreau Thanks again to Dietmar Offenhuber and Paolo Ciuccarelli for taking the time to sit down with me. Design As as a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at Design observer dot com slash Design As. You can always find Design As on any podcatcher of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write us a review, share it with a friend and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer. Special thanks to Maxine Philavong at the Northeastern Recording Studio and Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt. This episode was mixed by Judybelle Camangyan. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.