After four years, the time is ripe to reveal the precise meaning of (half of) the title of our research framework (and of this blog): “Density”.
I have to admit that at the beginning the choice of this term – and the idea of researching on that – was more like the verbal synthesis of a very raw intuition, a vision without a clear definition. Nowadays our research and educational experiences – through the laboratory course “Density | Complexity and Communication Design”, all the thesis and the PhD work – confirm the goodness of this first intuition and the vision has a brief definition: with Density we mean the relation (the ratio) between time and complexity in the decision processes. The world becomes more and more complex (glocal, interconnected, fluid, etc.), changing faster then ever. So that we are asked to make quick decisions for complex problem and/or in complex systems, and forced to deal with complexity (current and future changes can be really understood only using an approach based on non-linearity and complexity): definitely a dense situation.

We strongly believe that integrating the right approach with the competences of designers in visualization and representation, the discipline of Communication Design can cope with dense situations, providing effective tools (diagrams, primarily) to improve the decision process and making profit from the richness of complexity.

We’re still working on that, but some interesting results already emerged, as you can see (I hope!) browsing our blog.