Projects - Visual Explanations - DensityDesign Lab Final Synthesis Design Studio 2021/2022 - Mediazioni algoritmiche

Report — Website

Data as artefact

Mapping climate change with digital traces

In the second phase of the course, students learn how to use online data to study social and cultural phenomena. Online devices such as social media and search engines mediate our access to information, playing a crucial role in organizing, ordering, and ranking content. Confronted with society’s inability to face the climate crisis, the question of what is deemed visibility online (and what is not) gains even more urgency. In this phase, students explored aspects of the climate crisis by finding ways to repurpose digital platforms and online services. In a question-driven process, each group explored a climate-related issue in a specific online space, designed a series of protocols for data collection and analysis, and produced research findings using data visualizations. In the process, students engaged with issues related to web-based data, from understanding platform biases to the uncertainty and incompleteness of available data. The outcomes of this phase are printed reports offering multiple perspectives on the role of online devices in mediating information about the climate crisis.

Data publics

Republishing data into digital narratives for the public

The last phase of the course is closely related to the second one. Students were asked to identify one relevant aspect from their initial explorations and translate it into a digital experience or, better, a discursive communication artifact that exposes, reveals, and makes visible critical aspects of the topics to a specific audience. Students explore designerly means for republishing data to create situated meanings, primarily exploring the design of collections through archives and catalogs. Through the process, students reflected on the meaning and agency of the notion of “the public”: how different groups mobilize around various issues and how data can play a central role in forming different publics. Students were also encouraged to recognize the political role their design practices play with technology and how they impact society. The result of the phase is a digital narrative in website format designed to illustrate students’ views on the chosen topic. By leveraging digital and interactive techniques, each website is a digital experience illustrating a peculiar view on the broader topic of how humans are dealing with the climate crisis.

Climate visualsLitong Sun, Lucrezia Spapperi Gestri, Manman Li, Ran Lin, Ye Li, Yiheng Zhong, Yijia Gao

How Do Climate Images Circulate Online

Image is a compelling visual medium for depicting real people, communicating truths, and creating new narratives. Additionally, when coupled with climate change, its emotionally powerful images can raise audience awareness of the issue. And how, precisely, “ClimateVisuals” - the climate image library, is a powerful platform built on trustworthy compass points. In this project, we analyse using a selection of images from ”ClimateVisuals”.

Climate Images Location Map

ClimateVisuals advocated that online publishers use authentic local images to illustrate or disseminate the specific climate issues behind them. However, we found that some images were being used incorrectly on the internet to depict climate change events in the wrong places. In this project, we created an online map tool for audiences to use in this project to explore climate issues and the current misuse status of various climate images.

GreenwashingSilvia Altamura, Ana Doric, Wanlin Li, Jessica Moreschi, Martina Paggi, Matteo Repetto, Lucrezia Valentini

The Green Fever

The report looks into how major fast food companies in the U.S. present sustainability on their websites. The food sector is accountable for 34% of CO2 emissions, and the U.S. is a major contributor. Thus, the aim of the study is to discover common patterns or distinct formulas in the digital communication tactics used by these corporations in relation to their representation of environmental impact. The study also aims to detect instances of greenwashing (deceptive claims of environmental responsibility) by analysing the history of the website, including when the sustainability page was introduced and the images and keywords used on it.

The Green Recipe Archive

The ongoing climate change can be considered as one of the major topics of today. Thus, many companies have been motivated to align their businesses to the new green values. As one of the significant generators of CO2 emissions, fast food companies are trying to change the current statistics as well. In doing so, they've started talking about environmental consciousness: by using a website as an official communication tool, they can at ease reach an audience and spread their green narratives. This archive is therefore structured as a collection of these green narratives, in which real examples of sentences extracted from their websites can be consulted and explored. A special attention was paid to highlighting the strategies and common patterns behind them: the “ingredients” of their “green recipes”.

ReforestationGiulio Alessandrini, Maria Alexandra Chiojdeanu, Andrea Corsini, Greta Cozza, Miguel Gashi, Ana Muço, Alessia Mattesini

Lost in the Woods - A Hike through the Terms surrounding Reforestation

With the threat of climate change growing day by day, our responsibility to care for our planet is more important than ever. This is where reforestation comes into play. The topic is connected to a range of practices adapted to solving environmental problems, from restoring habitats to replanting acres of damaged woodland. However, due to these varying methods, a branching canopy of terms emerges. The aim of this investigation is to determine how these practices are connected, their growth over time, and which factors affect our associations to them. To conduct this analysis, three platforms were mainly used, Wikipedia, Google Trends and Google Images, to collect data and build findings. The following research expands on reforestation terms to find related topics using Wikipedia, allowing for the creation of network graphs which highlight connections and clusters between the data gathered. Google Trends was used to reveal the search trends of terms over time. Their popularity and how it fluctuates is shown, along with events and patterns that cause these changes. By analysing Google Image results, the way terms are visually portrayed is investigated. This reveals usage of common tropes they share, or imagery unique to them.

Plant Forward

This is a website that takes its cue from the research done on the topic of reforestation named Lost in Woods, from the images found for that research in fact an archive was designed to understand how the images represent reforestation. Specifically we sorted the images according to how old the plant within was visually, we then presented this order in a continuous morphing between the images, thus creating the illusion of a plant growing with the passage of time. alongside this visualization we placed a sort of timeline so that at a glance we could estimate how many images represented the various stages of tree growth. The core of the site is then accompanied by an initial scrollytelling that explains the theme of the work and the logic of sorting the images, and an about page that explains the research methodologies applied to this project.

Fast fashionGiovanni Bonassi, Cecilia Buonocunto, Martina Bracchi, Silvia Casavola, Vlada Ershova, Kateryna Lapshyna, Matteo Visini

Ultra-fast

The buzz around fast fashion retailers, how sustainable and ethical they are, has been circulating in the media for quite a while. Companies like Shein, H&M, Zara, Mango, etc. are more and more frequently criticised by green activists and conscious consumers, especially of younger generations. However, these brands’ popularity does not seem to fall down, because of their affordability, readiness and fashionability. The issue was observed from three different perspectives: a more general point of view (observing Google Search results to track what are the most discussed topics online and how often they relate directly to the biggest fast fashion retailers), then the companies’ side (how they changed their policies, visual and verbal rhetorics over time in response to the sustainability trends) and finally the customers’ take (analysing user-generated-content on YouTube and especially video “hauls” to understand what they can tell about the issue in general and consumer behaviour patterns).

Found in Fast Fashion Factories

Fashion is one of the most labour-dependent industries, but many companies have decided to bypass production completely, by switching their homeland production with contracted-out manufacturing, especially in low-income countries. This way, all of the processes ended up being submerged, making it very hard to imagine that the clothes we see in stores were once made by someone, somewhere far away. Found in Fast Fashion Factories is a web archive that collects 6683 photos that were posted on Google Maps with the geolocation of 1000 garment factories around the world. By republishing this data, FFFF makes everyday objects, people and spaces that are usually unseen, available for people to consult. The goal is to get closer to the reality of these places, to share a different (hopefully, more candid) perspective about them, and restore the discarded physicality of people and processes behind the fashion industry.

Mapping digital activismKangying Chen, Giuseppe Defilippis, Stefano Gubiolo, Maria Martinuz, Donato Renzulli, Antonio Sacchet, Yuying Tang

#banprivatejets: the social debate

In 2022 private jets have become a relevant topic in the fight against climate change. Using #banprivatejets, groups of activists, politicians and scientists have begun to highlight the need to tax emissions of private jets more decisively or, more extremely, to ban them. We focused our research on how people discuss this topic on social networks, trying to understand which are the most recurring themes and what are the differences among various languages. The report is divided in three parts: the first research question investigates the debate on TikTok, the second question analyses the debate on Instagram images and the last one also talks about Instagram but with a focus on the debate taking place in the comments.

Jetology

In 2022 private jets have become a relevant topic in the fight against climate change. Using #banprivatejets, groups of activists, politicians and scientists have begun to highlight the need to tax emissions of private jets more decisively or, more extremely, to ban them. However, in participatory social network as TikTok, the debate generated by private jets is not only related to climate issues: there are numerous strands of debate that exploit climate discussion. What topics are the most discussed? Which are those thematic topic patterns that diverge from the main theme of environmental pollution?

Machine climate visualsAnna Cattaneo, Yiyuan Hu, Lara Macrini, Nicole Moreschi, Leonardo Puca, Silvia Sghirinzetti, Ce Zheng

ARTIFICIAL CLIMATE IMAGES: Questioning Stable Diffusion’s interpretations of climate change

Innovations in the digital sphere have made Artificial Intelligences new actors of the communication landscape. What if txt-to-img AIs were in charge of producing climate change visuals? This report uses Stable Diffusion – an open source txt-to-img AI – to question the relationship between humans and machines in the context of climate change imagery. Specifically, it focuses on Stable Diffusion's training set (images provided to Ai), latent space (image generation process), and outputs (new images generated by Ai). Therefore, the 3 research questions are: how are climate change actors and actions depicted in Stable Diffusion’s training set? What can latent space tell us about Stable Diffusion’s interpretations of climate change? How does Stable Diffusion represent people and their actions related to climate change in generated images?

EYE TO AI: Exposing human biases on climate change through AI

The future has arrived: text-to-image AI is here, we can now generate images from simple text descriptions. Tools like Dall-e and Stable Diffusion are rapidly spreading, but behind the facade of a simple and fun technology there are some significant ethical concerns that aren't known to the public. Eye to Al brings to light the biases and stereotypes on climate change that txt-to-img AI inherits from society, using the machine itself as a tool to expose its inherent issues while joining the wide debate on the myth of neutrality in technology. Testing Stable Diffusion, we generated 500 images starting from prompts that ranged among climate change related topics and defined clusters of biases based on observed patterns. The result is explorable through the website in the bias catalogue and the prompt explorer.

GreenwashingAndrea Benedetto, Simone Cerea, Camilla Guerci, Surabhi Gupta, Haleh Nobar, Alessandro Pedriali, Yousef Taffal.

A highway to greenness. Analysing green narratives in car brands’ adverts

During these last decades, the automotive industry seems to have taken some steps towards “sustainability”, by increasing fuel efficiency and developing hybrid and “emission-free” powertrains. Despite this, it is still often accused of greenwashing, since many brands still don’t plan to cease the production of internal combustion engine vehicles nor to stop collaborating or lobbying with fossil fuel companies, even when their line-up is “fully electric”. And when it comes to batteries, there lays the problem of mining rare-earth metals. The report is the result of an investigative effort on the communication strategies that car brands adapt to make their models appear more “eco-friendly” in their video advertisements, starting from 90 different best selling vehicles in Europe in 2021—30 for each major propulsion type.

Automotifs. A collection of recurring communication strategies related to sustainability in car adverts on YouTube

Automotifs is a collection of sustainability-related communication strategies found in car adverts on YouTube: today, most car brands tend to use communication strategies that could be interpreted both as a subtle way to associate their models and image to the concept of sustainability and as typical advertising efforts. Thus, they could be leveraged not to just persuade people into buying a new model, but to also promote a cleaner image of both themselves and their products. The website reveals them in a de-contextualised and straightforward manner by focusing on their peculiarities through supercuts and video collages, so that car owners, potential customers or people interested in mobility, energy transition and related topics can examine this content with a critical perspective, reflect on, or just form their opinion on it.

Faculty

  • Michele Mauri
  • Ángeles Briones
  • Gabriele Colombo
  • Simone Vantini
  • Salvatore Zingale

Teaching Assistants

  • Elena Aversa
  • Andrea Benedetti
  • Arianna Bellantuono
  • Tommaso Elli
  • Beatrice Gobbo

The Final Synthesis Design Studio is a laboratory that takes place at Politecnico di Milano, in the last year of the Master's Degree in Communication Design between September 2022 and January 2023.