The Boston view — Design (and data) in the emergency
A column by Paolo Ciuccarelli
Being (far) away when something serious happens in your home country is a strange condition. Sara Colombo and I were both in Boston when the COVID19 epidemics started to spread and hit badly in Italy. After a first moment of dismay, the optimism of the designer took over and we decided to take action against the pandemic. Sara is a research scientist at the Center for Design I founded and currently direct at Northeastern University in Boston, and we asked ourselves a simple question: “what can we do as designers right now?”. That’s how the Design for Emergency (DfE) platform was conceived and launched a few days after the lockdown was imposed in Milano and other cities in Northern Italy. Both because every design action should start by learning and a certain inclination for data, we decided to set up a four-stage process with the first one being a survey. The aim was to understand the feelings, the emotions and the needs of people forced to an unprecedented lockdown as a fundamental basis for any subsequent design action.
The response to the first survey in Italy has been strong: almost 2,000 answers in four days, far beyond any expectation. We had then in our hands a very interesting knowledge base that brought also two fundamental evidences when you cross design and data:
- Thick data matters, especially — but not only — for design, as you can read here (Italian) or here (English): Through big data you can observe people’s behavior but it’s inevitably a ‘distant’ view, that captures general trends and some structural relationships (what’s going on). It hardly conveys the nuances of qualitative, personal data and information that can help designers understand why something is happening, or is not happening, and then work around it. How to integrate the potential of both big and thick data in a unified quali-quantitative approach is still an open challenge.
- The analysis of qualitative, unstructured data is not an easy task, especially when you have to cope with different languages. Likely, the DfE project attracted a fantastic team of very motivated volunteers from FBK, Google and Uber and other organizations that helped with Natural Language Processing and data visualization. By adapting existing tools, coding and meshing up libraries the team created a protocol and some standards that could be applied to the different national ‘branches’ of the initiatives. The results of all the analysis will be soon collected in a dedicated website (stay tuned!), for now the visualizations of the Italian survey are available here.
Design for Emergency is now spreading over ten different countries, as an open platform meant to facilitate the exploitation of design competences when facing a crisis. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on how data is becoming an essential component of design and the importance of remaining close to the phenomenon those data represent.
Paolo Ciuccarelli
Center for Design, Northeastern University
