The DensityDesign lab: communication design experiments among complexity and sustainability

Social complexity requires new processes fundamentally attuned to the social and conversational nature of decision making and design work; they should tend to enable a more and more valuable interaction and dialogue among the actors of a social system. Heeding the perspective of Design discipline dealing with languages, the Communication Design could afford the creation of visual and interactive languages relevant to the representations of Complex systems, creating shared visions within multi-actor contexts. In this sense it can facilitate dialogues within participatory actions and verify the potential of communication artifacts in supporting and externalizing sustainable and self-adaptive learning processes. Assuming this contribution of design in the multidisciplinary framework of sustainability, a didactic and research initiatives has been established since 2004 at the Master Degree in Communication Design at the Milan Polytechnic. Using complexity as a keyword to understand reality, combining it with a continuous research for information aesthetics and representation, the The DensityDesign lab explores the emergent relationships among communication design, information visualization and complex systems. The paper will discuss the relevance of this approach in dealing with the social issues and the data dimension, and the impact of this practice in the master students' comprehensive background.