Cumulus conference To get there: designing together hosted by CÉSAAP Conférence des écoles supérieures d'Arts appliqués de Paris in Paris, France on April 11–13, 2018.

Today we are witnessing social changes lead by technology in an unprecedented way. An increasing number of people live in a highly problematic, hyper-connected, open, complex and dynamic world. This context empowers new spaces of encounter and action, allowing people to meet in new ways around common needs that affect their daily life and seek solutions as a group. New forms of citizenship collectives, DIY citizenship, civic initiatives and communities are having a leading role in the ‘city making’ and urban transformations worldwide. These actions could be seen as a new citizenship activism in which the emergence of technology democratize the use of digital platforms for connecting and scaling up. At the same time, digital technologies improve the use of data for involving people to adhere to causes and spread the collective action. The use of data in this type of activism is essentially collective because knowledge and skills become relevant in the context of the group peers (Milan, 2017). In this context, the relevance of Information Design and visualizations emerges as the visualizations process and is also, and directly, a tool for community building (Manzini, 2015). How to stimulate collaborative practices from design, in a context of data abundance and technological democratization, where a relevant segment of citizenship is acting towards social issues and beginning to use data for these means? Information designers seem to have a key role: to organize information so people can make their own decisions and take effective action. This paper focuses on the role of information designers as amalgamators involved in setting the scene between the direct action and the communicative spheres in citizenship activism projects. Designers facilitate the collective process among diverse actors through design data strategies that mash up the communicative aim of visual artifacts according to the actions that they pursue as well as reaching expected audiences. This paper explores the role of communication design in projects that seek to empower citizens to advocate for their social issues using data as evidence. How are collaborative practices through data communication happening? Data visualizations among other communication artifacts constitute part of the data activism communication repertoire that citizen activism is starting to incorporate in their ways of doing. Through a case study analysis of 8 projects, this paper delves in data-strategies behind communicative artifacts that pursue citizen collective action. Cases are analyzed through a critical approach (Dörk et al., 2013) from its disruptive aesthetics (Markussen, 2013) problem space and spaces of contest (Fuad-Luke, 2009; DiSalvo, 2012) considering their design techniques and design activist methods. The design data strategies identified seek to contribute to the amalgamation role of the designers involved in the communication design of citizen activism projects. Despite the diverse aims and targets of each case, first results attempt to frame the strategies that link the digital visual artifacts and the post-action that they pursue. Lack of documentation on how the cases were build and its subsequent impact are still matters for further design research.