Meta-design and Data Visualization: who designs the algorithm that will design your next chart?
The complexity and the impact of global challenges such as migration, climate change, AI and its ethics produces two concurrent movements in the design world: the re-emergence of systemic approaches (systemic design, design systems, living systems, cybernetics) and a diffused sense of urgency to reframe/rethink design, as a discipline and as a practice, with a number of active initiatives.
Both movements, in turn, directly or indirectly rely on the capacity to ‘transcend’ the specificity and the contingency of the single design act to embrace a meta-design approach, meant both as (a) the reflective practice of re-designing design and (b) the design of design systems — a set of principles and rules that generate specific, contextual design instances.
At the Center for Design we are observing and discussing the evolution of this rebound of metadesign and systemic thinking in a series of events that are gathering a ‘think-tank’ of scholars, experts and thought leaders as Hugh Dubberly, Paul Pangaro, Nathan Felde and others around the topic.
The more we dig into it the more I think that the interpretation of meta-design as ‘the design of design (generative) systems’ is potentially very interesting for Data Visualization and Information Design, and it may lead to innovative solutions in different areas — and spark the need of new profiles:
a) The automatic creation of (data-driven) visual artifacts as infographics and video is growing fast, there will be a need of designers that can inform the automatic design process foreseeing the range of potential outcomes, or defining the templates and the rules to populate them: So, who designs the algorithm that will design your next chart?
b) The range of tools and libraries for designing data visualizations and information graphics is also growing — I’d call this meta-design just for the fact that the intended user is a designer, and the designer who designs the tool and the library needs to have a great deal of knowledge about the designer process and how it will eventually unfold.
c) The disciplines of Data Visualization and Information Design seem to call for a deep self-reflective session: the pandemic exposed all potential pitfalls and threats of both intentional misuse and poor knowledge of the data visualization principles; in the deluge of visual representations of COVID19-related data something clearly didn’t work. I personally believe that a step back to the roots, reconsidering — and re-assuming — some of the pillars of Information Architecture, would be beneficial, and in the definition of Richard Saul Wurman, Information Architecture has the traits of a meta-design approach: “I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work — the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear.”
Many questions, few answers so far, a lot of work for both design researchers and practitioners that don’t want to get trapped into a techno-driven, mediatic course without taking a chance of shaping it.
Paolo Ciuccarelli
Center for Design, Northeastern University
Partner at The Visual Agency
