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 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
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.
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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.
Observing the state of Western democracies, trust in institutions is not growing proportionally, and low civic participation indicates a crisis of representation. When called upon, design can contribute to the empowerment of active citizenship and public administration, participating in the definition of artefacts that express norms, rights, and services. Especially in the digital context, design becomes regulative, affecting law-making and decision-making processes by means of its choices of representation and user experience. Through an international retrospective – including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, France, and Italy – this paper investigates codes and languages, from institutional design to information design and legal design, to verify the contemporary potential of design for public interest.
In the age of visual overproduction, the digital image has become a continuous and ubiquitous stream—characterized by speed, excess, and instant accessibility. This perceptual overload leads to a passive and superficial consumption of visual content, hindering a critical and in-depth understanding of reality. Within this context, the book—not only as a physical object but as a media device with its own pace, rhythms, and languages—regains a strategic function: that of interrupting, defusing, and reframing the flow. When examined for its critical and projective potential, the book emerges as a space of resistance, a site for deceleration, and a tool for renegotiating the gaze. This paper explores this hypothesis through a selection of publications developed in recent years at Studio Image, a visual research lab experimenting with hybrid editorial forms that intersect photography, text, and editorial design. The analyzed works, conceived as alternative ‘codices’ to dominant visual communication, challenge the immediacy of images by offering modes of reading and interpretation that are deeper, layered, and more conscious. In this sense, the book is not an analog relic, but an active device capable of critically engaging with the visual present and restoring agency to the viewer/reader.
This contribution presents a didactic experiment carried out in two visual communication schools (ABADIR Catania and IAAD Bologna), aimed at exploring the potential and limitations of icono-pictographic representation as a tool for synthesis and narrative translation. The project is based on the visual “translation” of Isaac Asimov’s short story "The Fun They Had" (1957), which revolves around themes of education, knowledge transmission, and automation. After summarizing the story into ten key points, each student represented each point using a string of original icons, designed within a fixed 9×9 grid. The workshop produced a wide variety of outcomes, ranging from more descriptive or symbolic approaches to coherent systems of personal encoding. The activity prompted significant reflections: on how formal constraints influence creative processes, on the balance between clarity and expressive autonomy, and on the role that iconic, pictographic, and ideographic writing can play in teaching visual communication. The essay reconstructs the context, structure, and outcomes of the workshop, and offers a critical interpretation of the experience from linguistic, graphic, and pedagogical perspectives.
The contribution outlines the reasons that form the basis of a line of research that has long been the focus of the "Visual Communication Research Lab": the tradition of the new, as part of the broader SIDE Research Group at Vanvitelli University. This is open-ended, ongoing research, but we felt it could be a useful topic for shared reflection to inaugurate this new direction for Progetto grafico Journal. The contribution therefore, attempts to construct and synthesise a theoretical basis through which to engage in reflection on linear typographic writing, its destiny, its transformations in digital environments, the influences derived from the worlds of art and cyber experimentation, and its possible developments. A complex topic, but one that we believe to be central to contemporary debate, even if its interdisciplinary origins go unnoticed. It is not a semiological analysis of the “visuality of writing”. The assumptions of this research start from the premise that, regardless of nostalgic radicalism and personal convictions, digital technology has profoundly changed our relationship with literature: the written text, in its alphabetic and Western configuration, has lost its hegemony as a tool for accessing knowledge, whereas GenZ and those who follow are being educated in synthetic and immersive environments which, having abandoned the linearity of the typographic line, present themselves as hybrid systems in which writing – written-graphic, mobile, dynamic and interactive – constitute and make available reservoirs of information in continuous collision and reconfiguration 1. Magmatic environments in which alphabetic texts, signs, symbols, codes, images, and frames present themselves as new objectual, mythological realities, representing not so much content in itself as nodes of relationships in an interconnected ecosystem of thought. They are useful keys to unlocking worlds of knowledge which, having abandoned the codex form of the book, inhabit writing systems that are not necessarily alphabetic and which, to be investigated, mastered, or configured, require new forms of design but also education in learning. A theoretical basis, not exhaustive, apparently far from the dimension of graphic design, which is instead assumed to be useful for those involved in design and training: to ask oneself what it means to approach modes of writing far from the codicological forms of the printed book or its reproduction in digital form; to refine tools for accessing content in new modes of teaching; to educate the mind to multidimensional structures of knowledge formalisation and, therefore, to move towards approaches to knowledge that, abandoning the linear and paratactic forms of the twentieth century, open up heuristic, multimodal, experimental and immersive paths which, in their being still to be codified, allow us to imagine new epistemological spaces.
A New Direction to Continue Nurturing the Culture of Design
This 41st issue of Progetto Grafico, AIAP's historic magazine, represents an important milestone in an equally important year for the Association. In 2025, AIAP celebrates its 80th anniversary. It has been a long history, marked by significant changes for the Association, but above all for the professional and disciplinary area it has sought to represent over these eight decades. Moreover, we are talking about a broad area that is increasingly difficult to confine within the margins of what we tend to define as graphic design. In its 22 years of publication, Progetto Grafico has recorded and discussed some of the changes that have taken place in the fields of the profession and discipline. It has sought to investigate and explore many of them, and has in turn changed the way it addresses them several times. After a long gestation period, the Association's publication restarts as a scientific journal.
Adopting an integrated vision of writing means not only working for the representation of minority writing systems outside and within Unicode encoding, but also rethinking the approaches and methodologies of typographic design. This article offers a synthesis of the debate on the definition of "writing," tracing the approaches and paradigm shifts. It argues that prevalent phonocentric models often fail to account for the symbolic and cultural complexity of African writing traditions, a limitation that resurfaces in Unicode encoding. Developed within the Missing Scripts research program, the following contribution presents the case of the Masaba script from Mali. The repertoire of signs is examined by applying methods that calculate complexity and reconstruct the internal logic of the system, an analysis that guides the design of the first digital typeface for Masaba.
With issue 41, Progetto Grafico initiates a new editorial phase aligned with AIAP strategies, articulating itself into two complementary publications: a scientific version, the Journal, under my direction, and a Magazine addressed to a professional audience. The Journal responds to the requirements of the national and international scientific community in communication design. Its structure has been updated to align with quality criteria defined by ANVUR and other international research evaluation bodies. To meet these criteria, the new Progetto Grafico establishes broad cultural objectives in continuity with founding principles.