PROGETTO GRAFICO is the long-standing journal published since 2003 by AIAP, the Italian Association of Visual Communication Design. It is a biannual scientific journal, classified in band A in the ANVUR lists for the field of design. Starting in 2025, with issue 41, a new editorial phase began, characterised by an Open Access policy and a revamped project that responds to the emerging needs of the national and international scientific community in the field of communication design.
AIAP - Associazione italiana design della comunicazione visiva
The review presents Briar Levit's volume as a hybrid text — part memoir, part pedagogical manifesto, part methodological reflection — that recounts in dialogic and chronologically progressive form the author's personal and professional trajectory through the interweaving of graphic design, feminism, and the practice of friendship as a mode of collective knowledge-building. Structured in three sections, the book moves through Levit's experience as art director of Bitch Magazine, her teaching practice oriented towards autonomous thinking and horizontal exchange between teacher and student, and her commitment to the collaborative archive The People's Graphic Design Archive and the edited volume Baseline Shift (2021). The review situates the book within the growing critical corpus addressing feminism in design: not merely as a question of representation, but as a rethinking of practices, historical canons, and disciplinary hierarchies, with the aim of constructing more inclusive narratives capable of giving voice to marginal histories and dismantling the binary structures that have long shaped the international history of graphic design.
Copyright (c) 2026 Progetto Grafico Journal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The review traces the editorial history and critical project of Alessandro Ludovico's Post-digital print, now in its second Italian edition (Timeo, 2025), following a deliberately hybrid first distribution: released as a PDF on pen drives and in open-access format even before the printed version appeared, the book enacts in its own mode of dissemination the very argument it advances. Ludovico does not read print as a relic of the past, but as a versatile medium continuously redefining itself in dialogue with the digital: the post-digital horizon is one in which analog and digital coexist, contaminate each other, and multiply — from early twentieth-century avant-garde print to underground publications, from mimeographed zines to print-on-demand platforms. The review highlights the book's political and emancipatory value: ink and pixel do not exclude but reinforce each other, and print — in its slowness, its physicality, its spatial and temporal invariance — takes on the character of a material resistance to the volatility of the digital sphere and the fragmentation of knowledge.
Chromatophores prompts reflection on individual freedom, posing a deep and visceral question. The project offers the opportunity to integrate new perspectives and welcome new protagonists who can contribute to a reflection on the concept of identity, even outside the queer community. Visual language can thus be seen as a tool capable of making often marginalized human issues and emotional experiences visible, fostering their understanding by a wider audience and helping to counter processes of stigmatization and social inequality.
The Role of Cooperatives in Communication Design in Italy
Cooperatives offer a model of communication design that structurally remedies excessive market fragmentation. This fragmentation leaves a multitude of freelancers competing for reputation, often lacking proper corporate protection and economic leverage. The democratic governance of cooperatives ensures that professionals' ambitions align with the organization's goals. The Italian communication design sector is primarily composed of micro-enterprises with limited bargaining power, as well as independent professionals operating individually. A secondary channel, characterized by social media and freelance platforms, often offers symbolic payment and reputational capital that does not translate into stable income. Cooperatives offer a practical alternative to traditional models, as they share risks among members, which helps provide steady incomes and protect rights.
In the contemporary context, museums are no longer institutions exclusively dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage, but are permeable to power dynamics and politics. Through a critique of the museum narrative system and the analysis of five case studies, this contribution highlights the central role of Visual Communication Design in the construction of counter-narratives capable of deconstructing the exclusivity and hierarchy of exhibition spaces traditionally considered neutral.
This article investigates the potential of visual communication design as a critical, pedagogical, and political practice. It outlines a theoretical framework that conceptualizes design as an agonistic and reflexive practice aimed at making visible the tensions and conflicts that structure the public sphere. The research is developed through a design-based experiment conducted within the Critical and Collective Mapping workshop at the University of Padua. The experience, which involved geography students, demonstrates how the use of specific design devices — graphic tools intended to facilitate dialogue and collective design — can activate processes of transformative learning and foster the development of critical design literacy. Drawing on qualitative and autoethnographic methods, the study shows how collective mapping practices and the associated graphic design processes can function as forms of critical reappropriation of lived space.
This article aims to define a political role for design that amplifies its social, cultural and political dimensions. In particular, it advocates for a role that goes beyond functionalism in challenging the neoliberal system and influencing the processes of urban regeneration in our cities. Starting from an overview of neoliberalism and its impact on our daily lives, the article highlights participatory urban transformation processes as spaces in which design can assume a more ethical and radical role. It explores some experiments and insights drawn from practice and underlines the need for a new approach to participatory design. This approach should focus not only on the functionality of participatory infrastructures, but also on the collection, systematisation, capitalisation and maintenance of the visibility of knowledge networks and relationships generated by participatory urban planning. In particular, the article suggests combining communication design, participatory planning and a research-through-design approach to emphasise the importance of valorising the legacy of these processes and, through this, developing knowledge frameworks to counter the negative effects of the exploitation of human, creative, social, cultural and economic capital typical of neoliberalism.
This contribution explores the role of design — in particular of communication design — as a political practice capable of generating queer cultural infrastructures through open, participatory and situated methodologies. In a context in which communication produces and regulates public imaginaries, the research investigates how open design and queer-informed perspectives can overcome representational logics and transform design into a device of social activation. The theoretical framework interweaves queer theory, open design and critical pedagogies, highlighting the potential of design as a process of world-building and as an educational practice oriented towards empowerment and the co-production of knowledge. The adopted methodology is grounded in immersive co-design, understood as a recursive and community-based process through which solutions, narratives and adaptable resources emerge. Two project ideas — Queer Generative Futures and Queering Learning — demonstrate how such principles can be translated into scalable and exportable operational models.
Antidisciplinary Design as Epistemic Resistance
This article investigates how the integration of antidisciplinary, antagonist, and speculative approaches can activate critical and political agency in the projects developed by students involved in a teaching workshop within the field of communication design. In particular, the antidisciplinary approach is framed as a form of epistemic resistance: the strategic suspension of disciplinary boundaries acts on the way in which knowledge is produced and rendered visible in the form of artefacts, devices, and interfaces. The communicative projects developed in the workshop aim to generate critical reflection, in opposition to a morally reassuring design that risks becoming politically innocuous. Projects are therefore treated as generators of uncertainty: devices capable of triggering doubt-driven critical thinking.
Communication design today faces a saturated and accelerated ecosystem that weakens its critical capacity as a cultural agent. It shares this systemic vulnerability with memory, especially individual memory, now overwritten by hyper-visibility and the delegation of recollection to technical devices, generating forms of marginalization and atrophy in the representation of the self. This text investigates how the discipline can become a practice of mnestic resistance, capable of recognizing, translating, and remedying such vulnerability through a shared action, considering interdisciplinary exchange as a resource. The notion of the mnemotope, understood as a non-institutional place of memory where traces, emotions, and lived experiences intertwine, offers an interpretive framework for understanding memory as a situated and relational phenomenon. Within this perspective lies Mnemofoto, a phototextual project that gathers, photographs, and restores places of individual memory. The project reactivates intimate narratives and restores authorship to the subjects involved, transforming the designer into a mediator of the relationship between place, memory, and testimony. The subsequent exhibition The Earth Is a Great Memory, held at the Vincenzo Agnetti Archive, amplifies these dynamics by placing the phototexts in dialogue with the artist's poetics and works, particularly with his concept of dimenticato a memoria, "forgotten by heart".
Signs & Symbols Among Design, Resistance & Collectivity
This article develops a preliminary taxonomy of semiotic disobedience through an inductive approach applied to sixteen case studies distributed geographically and temporally. Through the comparative analysis of sixteen case studies — from the Pink Triangle to the Palestinian Watermelon, from the LGBTQ+ Lambda to the Jolly Roger of One Piece — the study identifies three recurring operative mechanisms: transposition, which inverts the semantic valence of symbols of oppression or everyday life; archetypal construction, which generates entirely new visual codes destined to sediment as collective memory; and code hacking, which deliberately manipulates popular culture symbols, institutional communicative artefacts, and visual systems through allusion, metaphor and polysemy, conveying messages of dissent without necessarily resorting to explicit slogans, in order to evade contemporary systems of algorithmic censorship and the most insidious forms of pre-emptive control.
This article examines the covers of La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia (1923–1943), one of the primary instruments of visual propaganda of the Fascist regime. Through a thematic and iconographic approach, the study identifies recurring narrative clusters, ranging from Roman antiquity to industrial modernity, from the cult of the body and sport to productive rurality, and finally to the depiction of everyday life. It highlights how imagery was employed to construct and disseminate an aesthetic of consent. The covers, created by prominent artists and graphic designers of the period, such as Mario Sironi, Paolo Garretto, Bruno Munari, Fortunato Depero, and Alberto Salietti, reveal the hybrid and strategic nature of the Fascist cultural project, in which art, ideology, and visual communication converge into a grammar of power. The analysis offers an exemplary reading of the main figurative and rhetorical constants that define the regime's visual imaginary, positioning the magazine as a central node in the production of Fascist visual culture and as a device for identity construction, without implying any form of legitimation or value judgment regarding its communicative effectiveness.
The way a community observes and interprets reality, its scopic regime, is a socially constructed phenomenon. What we perceive is neither neutral nor self-evident, but is made possible by a network of practices, devices, and tools that define what can be seen and understood in relation to specific historical and socio-economic conditions. Adopting a theoretical-critical approach, this paper aims to examine the role of images in shaping the contemporary gaze from an interdisciplinary perspective that intertwines communication design with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and anthropology. Within the current mediascape, the construction of the collective imaginary has been progressively delegated to the market, which shapes its forms, languages, and desires. By highlighting the role of images as devices capable of orienting emotions, beliefs, and behaviors, this analysis traces a trajectory extending from the biological and subjective dimensions of visual perception to contemporary media regimes. In response to the commodification of vision, this study points to a revaluation of the irrational, positioning artists and designers as catalysts for new imaginaries and recognizing the automation of machines as an ally capable of relieving human beings of the constraints of technical labor.
Political news is characterised by the recurrence of cognitive distortions, polarised perspectives, systematic biases, and fallacious arguments, all of which significantly contribute to the shaping of public opinion. Given that in democratic systems political action is defined by the will of the people, limiting the impact of these agents and ensuring an adequately informed citizenry is a paramount priority for the proper functioning of public affairs. This research investigates the relationship between visual communication and political news, focusing on the potential efficacy of graphic design within the fight against misinformation. Following a review of the existing literature, an experiment is conducted to verify the specific effectiveness of one of the best practices suggested in the literature (inoculation theory) combined with a graphic representation (Euler diagrams) in mitigating a specific logical fallacy (false cause). The results show a substantial equivalence between the experimental and control groups, but simultaneously highlight a greater capacity for recognising the distortion among those who demonstrate an understanding of the fallacy. Further investigations are therefore encouraged to explore the multiple graphic and design combinations offered by the proposed theoretical framework, while integrating into evaluations additional relevant variables such as cognitive attention and engagement.
In an age marked by information saturation, hypervisibility, and the progressive automation of processes, communication design emerges as a crucial site where meaning, access, and power are negotiated. This article advances a theoretical and critical inquiry into communication design as an inherently political practice, examining its ontological, performative, and ethical dimensions within contemporary society. Grounded in its mediating and translational role between content systems and users, design is framed as an interpretative apparatus that configures conditions of access, inclusion, and exclusion, while generating implicit normative effects. Within the expanding ecosystem of the "platform society" and artificial intelligence, these dynamics are further intensified, giving rise to a condition of "hyper-responsibility," whereby designers are compelled to confront the systemic — and often unpredictable — consequences of their actions. The contribution critically challenges the rhetoric of "design for good," exposing the discipline's entanglement with mechanisms of power, control, and manipulation. In this light, design emerges as a site of critical tension and a potential space of resistance against the ongoing political reconfiguration of rights and democratic values.
Issue 42 of Progetto Grafico appears at a historical moment and within a geopolitical context marked by numerous international conflicts and a condition of profound political, social, and economic instability, in which ethical principles such as democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, inclusivity, equality, tolerance, and sustainability are being seriously called into question. In this scenario, communication design, in its capacity as translator of contents, device for access to knowledge, vehicle of information, and means of persuasion, finds itself invested with new responsibilities and deep antinomies: to serve the new political strategies, or to pursue the ethical values linked to progress and the common good that have inspired it for many decades. Drawing on a topic proposed jointly by Valeria Bucchetti and Gianni Sinni, the volume addresses the theme Design Under Attack. Politics, Values and Responsibility Principles, interrogating the role and the epistemic, ethical, and operative statute of communication design in the face of a global context marked by growing inequalities, migration crises, regressions of civil rights, climate catastrophes, and information warfare.
In the context of the knowledge economy, the proliferation of data and the growing complexity of information systems call for new forms of knowledge production, access, and interpretation. This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological reflection on data visualization as a cognitive and cultural practice, aiming to move beyond the purely aesthetic conception of data to investigate its epistemic, interpretive, and situated dimensions. Through a critical analysis of computational methods and visual languages — including clustering techniques, network-based models, dimensionality reduction, and interactive interfaces — the paper highlights how the visual form of information is never neutral, but instead embodies design choices, ideological frameworks, and cultural assumptions that shape meaning-making. From this perspective, visualization is understood not simply as a functional representation, but as a semantic space and a knowledge device. Particular attention is given to the potential of Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs) in data visualization processes. These technologies, which enable interaction between neural activity and digital systems, introduce a new dimension to the visual experience of data: they allow for real-time monitoring of representational effectiveness and support the design of adaptive systems responsive to users’ cognitive signals. This approach opens up advanced research scenarios, where the boundaries between visualization, perception, and interpretation become increasingly fluid. The aim is to outline a theoretical framework in which information design emerges as an interpretive and relational practice — one capable of transforming data into language, and language into shared knowledge. In this transition — from represented to generated data — new horizons unfold for graphic design and for the visual mediation of complexity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Progetto Grafico Journal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
CREATIVITY AND CULTURE IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE AI
The paper explores the relationship between language, culture, and generative artificial intelligence through a qualitative comparison of multilingual text-to-image models. Starting from three literary passages originally written in English, Italian, and Chinese, a trial was designed in order to analyze the impact of the user's native language on the production of visual content through AI software, as well as the impact of the language with which the latter were trained. The texts were transformed into prompts using different linguistic systems, and the generated images were then compared based on qualitative criteria. The study takes an exploratory approach and focuses on aspects such as semantic rendering, stylistic consistency, and the presence of implicit or explicit cultural elements. The aim is to explore the possibility that generative AI is not a neutral tool destined to culturally flatten the content generated in the future, but that it may instead reflect, or distort, the cognitive and symbolic specificities linked to the language and culture with which it interacts.
The article explores the interconnection between graphic design and cartography, with a specific focus on maps created in emergency contexts. The analysis deals with case studies at the intersection of information design, cartographic implementations and contemporary crises considered as relevant application scenarios. By reflecting on how platforms, technologies and visual languages shape not only the representational possibilities of maps but also the construction of meaning and the way they are understood and interpreted, the study highlights the blurring or overlapping of roles between designer and user, in a breakdown of similarities and divergences that lead to multiplications and, at times, the shattering of identity. To this end, a selection of exemplary visualisations was identified according to a list of specific design objectives: information, dissemination, preparation, investigation, participation, reaction and activism. The selected maps are analysed through a methodological framework that integrates theoretical models of visualisation, reflections on modes of user interaction and approaches borrowed from critical cartography. The final objective is to clarify the impact of the implemented textual and visual choices on our understanding of the described phenomena.
This study investigates the evolution of inequality visualization through a genealogical analysis spanning, inside the topic, from early 19th-century maps to contemporary digital interfaces. The research documents how graphic representation of social disparities has progressively evolved from a documentation tool to a device of resistance and active participation. After an introduction to the theme of inequality and the potential of graphic visualizations to represent highly complex issues, the paper presents some examples of disparity mapping from past centuries. The analysis of emblematic historical cases – from Parent du Châtelet's and W.E.B. Du Bois's maps to William Bunge's militant visualizations – reveals how each era has developed specific modalities for visual translation of social data to represent the multiplicity of inequalities. In the second part of the text, three contemporary case studies exemplify the transition toward interactive paradigms that integrate gamification, big data analytics, and forms of participatory advocacy. The research demonstrates how this evolution constitutes an epistemological revolution that transforms users from passive recipients to active co-constructors of knowledge. Finally, the conclusions highlight how current cases represent a transitional phase toward possible post-digital configurations, emphasizing the need to orient emerging technologies toward democratizing access to knowledge and amplifying marginalized voices.
Written by South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han in 2024 and published by Einaudi, the book La Crisi della Narrazione gathers critical reflections on the transformations of communication in a society increasingly shaped by consumer culture. Through an essayistic approach grounded in philosophical references, Han reflects on how, in the present era of transformative economics, communication becomes a strategic tool for shaping individual identity. Whereas the graphic sign was once considered the primary narrative vehicle, today it has become one of several devices that designers may employ to foster inner transformations in the process of constructing networks of meaning. Human beings, defined by Han as Animal Narrans, have always sought to make sense of their existence through storytelling. Yet the current communicative system has replaced narrative storytelling with consumerist information, sacrificing the depth of narrative experience in favor of rapid, instantaneous, and often sterile consumption, oriented more toward the logic of “telling to sell”.
This analysis explores the title sequences of contemporary television series, as thresholds devised to activate speci!c communicative functions. Assisted by streaming platforms, today's opening credits have acquired strategic significance, even resisting the 'skip into' option and becoming tools of visual meta-narrative. Three distinct analytical dimensions emerge: narrative, which guides audience expectations by signaling tone and thematic codes; visuals and graphics, understood as expanded writing that includes typography, imagery and sound; and ritual, which reaffirms with each episode the fictional pact with viewers through a series of deliberate variations. The analysis is based on a network of visual and sound variables – typography, colour, light and shade, composition and editing, images and icons, rhythm and music – viewed as force fields with associative or dissociative behaviour. Through observation of various cases, four recurring configurations have been identified – typographic-essential, synsemic-immersive, narrative-archival, and iconic-cartoonish – which are intended as interpretive frameworks rather than rigid classifications. Title sequences are complex visual-verbal systems, design laboratories capable of condensing tone, symbolic values and series identity. Their power of synthesis and ability to orchestrate multimodality offer communication design a working vocabulary that can be applied to other fields, from branding to digital interfaces.
ELDERLY-SENSITIVE EDITORIAL TRANSLATIONS
The research illustrates a methodological approach aimed at highlighting some factors useful for the design of accessible publishing artefacts intended primarily, but not exclusively, for readers over the age of 65. After a critical review of multiple contributions on microtypography, visual ergonomics and publishing translation, 100 cases of good practice were surveyed, highlighting the scarcity of volumes designed for the elderly. An initial experimental workshop in the !eld of education involved designers and students in processes of intrasemiotic and intersemiotic translation of the historical novel Q, which, due to its peculiarities, lends itself to linguistic transfer processes. This initial experiment led to a second empirical study aimed at modelling three meta-volumes that differ from each other in terms of text and iconography. The overall results confirm the multifactorial nature of legibility: body, line spacing, contrast, layout, support and orientation devices must work in synergy. Understanding editorial design as a translational process — intralinguistic, intersemiotic and ethical — allows for the integration of multiple sensory channels without impoverishing the overall meaning of the source text. The direct involvement of readers over the age of 65, taken as model readers, proves decisive in avoiding stigmatising solutions and enhancing the quality of a reading experience open to all. On a theoretical level, the research combines issues related to accessibility in the reading process, editorial translation practices, and knowledge related to typography and microtypography, proposing a concept of the book as a polyalphabetic text. Further developments may concern possible hybridisations between paper formats and products generated by generative artificial intelligence for the dynamic customisation of layouts and content.
In a journal that calls for renewal in the field of graphic design, reviewing a book approaching its forty-fifth anniversary may appear a somewhat audacious gesture. Nonetheless, Monogrammi e figure. Teorie e storie della progettazione di artefatti comunicativi by Giovanni Anceschi, published in 1981 by La Casa Usher in Florence, continues to offer theoretical propositions from which such a need for renewal may meaningfully arise ". The contribution this re-reading may offer to the discipline is articulated primarily in two key areas: the question of method, namely how to theorize within the domain of graphic design, where Anceschi identifies taxonomy as the fundamental device; and the question of what, which involves defining the object of study and intervention proper to the profession. This is articulated through the dichotomy between the communicative artifact and graphic systems, as well as the relationship between the configuration of the product and that of the message it 'hosts' in its graphic component.
Design Vocabularies is a visual inquiry into the semantic spaces of design; an attempt to surface, compare, and track the word-worlds that different communities use when “design” is discussed. The (academic) design community has been always grappling with those questions: what do we actually mean when we say design? How do those meanings shift across academic research, professional practice, and public discourse? Framed this way, the project treats every mention of design as an entry point into a larger, relational vocabulary—terms like method, process, research, medium, practice—whose associations reveal how the field positions itself and evolves over time. Housed within the Center for Design’s Design Observatory, the project functions as a lens of a broader “macroscope,” a conceptual, visual, and operational instrument meant to observe complex systems by integrating multiple methods and viewpoints. The Observatory’s mission is to observe and represent design as an adaptive, interdisciplinary system; Design Vocabularies concretizes that mission by mapping how design is spoken about, rather than seeking for a uni!ed de!nition or prescribing what it should be.
Italian keyboards do not include Greek characters or the necessary diacritics, rendering digital writing fragmented and inefficient. The result is a reduced and standardized representation of the language, modeled on dominant Italian writing. The introduction of a multiscript digital keyboard for Salentino Greek constitutes a concrete critical design proposal. It addresses the issues of the marginalization of Greek letters in recent lexicographies and the lack of typographic and digital support, which imposes incoherent transliterations. The project resolves these problems, enabling the alternation and coexistence of Greek and Latin characters for more accurate phonological representation. Methodologically, the keyboard is a conceptual prototype developed on the characters of Salentino Greek writing, currently under experimental testing and subject to revision. It is not merely a theoretical simulation but a model testable on open-source keyboard-mapping platforms.
Visuals and synsemic writings for more-than-human scenarios
his contribution explores the evolution of digital graphic design beyond an anthropocentric perspective by adopting an exploratory approach that can recount silent natural processes and the intricate relationships between humans and non-humans. This evolution is evident in synsemic writing and visualisations that blend images, text, sound and spatial interaction to transform graphic design into a tangible, multisensory experience. With the advent of digital technology, writing loses its linear, alphabetic nature as text becomes hybridised with images, coding and movement. The sequential nature of information gives way to navigation, connections and relationships. We analyse a series of visual and synsemic writings as interpretative practices that measure and reproduce environments, ecosystems and living and non-living subjects, moving from linear to reticular writing. It is no longer just a matter of 'reading' but of 'inhabiting' and, metaphorically, feeling the text and image; experiencing them directly. Described as a true geological era recognised for its sudden impermanence, the digital era paradoxically enables us to transcend anthropocentric intentions. This is exemplified by the project Designing with More-Than-Humans, which uses advanced technologies to give a voice to seemingly inanimate elements such as rocks and volcanic landscapes in order to promote anti-hierarchical and interspecies ecological awareness. This approach culminates in the design of a novel human–nature relationship, translating into visual interactions mediated by hybrid technologies and transdisciplinary immersive experiences. Its ultimate aim is to subvert traditional design logics and promote responsible representation of natural ecosystems, revealing the intrinsic interconnectedness of our lives with the non-human.
Collective memory is not a collection of documents and recollections, but an active, selective, and often fragmentary construction. Archives, as cultural devices, do not merely preserve: they articulate what is remembered and what can be forgotten. This contribution investigates how, in the context of digital writing practices, such strategies of recording can generate models that weave together memories, testimonies, documents, and interpretations, involving both people and materials. From this perspective, we present Design Philology, an experimental platform for archiving, exploration, and narration developed by the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano. The platform investigates the potential of the archive as a space for open and plural writing, assuming partiality as a generative condition. The analysis focuses on the authorial sections of the archive (Narrazioni and Timeline) where the interface takes on a curatorial role, enabling the construction of interpretive and narrative paths. In these sections, the writing model allows authors to rewrite the archive through operations of montage, juxtaposition, and the articulation of relationships between contents. Archival materials, images, paratexts, institutional documents, personal testimonies, and multimedia contributions combine across different temporal and relational layers, giving shape to compositions that make visible thematic, biographical, or personal perspectives, and to partial and plural forms of memory-writing. In this context, Design Philology positions itself as an experimental prototype of digital mnēmography: an attempt to write institutional memory by exploring the complexity, incompleteness, and partiality of archival materials, as well as the multiplicity of those who have lived, interpreted, and transmitted this history.
From Data to Codex: Making Knowledge Public
In an increasingly datafied society, there is a growing urgency to develop practices capable of translating data into accessible and shared knowledge. This article examines Participatory Data Physicalization (PDP) as a design approach that enables processes of co-construction of knowledge through physicality, participation, and spatiality. Adopting a critical perspective, the paper proposes interpreting PDP as a form of collective and situated writing, redefining the concept of the codex: no longer a closed and linear device, but an open, distributed, and negotiable space for the shared production of knowledge. Through the analysis of four case studies conducted in civic, educational, and cultural contexts, the article highlights the key dimensions of PDP: data, bodies, time, and facilitation, and reflects on the role of designing frames to shape participation. The findings suggest that PDP can contribute to rethinking the relations between data and the public, offering new tools for civic education, social communication, and empowerment through information.
Models help us navigate the complexity of social life, offering simplified structures that make invisible dynamics legible. Networks stand out for their ability to represent relations directly: nodes and links reduce society to actors and their connections, exposing patterns that often remain hidden in linear accounts. Since the eighteenth century, networks have evolved from mathematical curiosities to essential tools across disciplines. Early sociograms revealed classroom friendships, sociological diagrams exposed social reproduction and inequality, and computational studies now map everything from recipes to scientific collaborations. With their visual grammar, networks invite comparison, clustering, and interpretation across diverse domains. Yet their ubiquity also introduces risks: layouts may be mistaken for objective spaces, central nodes assumed to be more important, and dense graphs admired more for aesthetics than insight. To address these challenges, a new form of literacy is required. Network literacy can be defined as the ability to understand, design, and read visual relational models, combining conceptual knowledge of complex systems with practical skills of visualization and critical interpretation. This paper develops the notion of network literacy as a civic and professional competency, bridging traditions of data literacy and visual literacy. It traces the history of networks from their mathematical and sociological origins to their integration into digital media and design, showing how they reconfigure the codex into a relational mode of reading. It then explores three dimensions: design choices that shape meaning, spatial thinking that guides interpretation, and experimental projects that turn visualization into performative practice. By situating networks at the intersection of information design, critical inquiry, and cultural practice, the paper argues that cultivating network literacy is essential for engaging responsibly with the relational fabric of contemporary knowledge.