Wednesday, 8 April 2015 | 9:00 to 10:00

Speaker: Dario Rodighiero, EPFL, Lausanne

Title:Representing Scientific Communities by Data Visualization”

Abstract

This seminar presents a research that investigates the representation of communities, and the way to foster their understanding by different audiences. Communities are complex multidimensional entities intrinsically difficult to represent synthetically. The way to represent them is likely to differ depending on the audience considered: governing entities trying to make decision for the future of the community, general public trying to understand the nature of the community and the members of the community themselves.

This work considers two communities in particular: the ENAC institutional community composed of faculty members and researchers and, at a world wide level, the emerging community of Digital Humanities researchers. For both cases, the research is organised as a process going from graphical research to actual materialization as physical artefacts (posters, maps, etc.), possibly extended using digital devices (augmented reality applications). Through iterative cycles of design and experimentation, the research explores theoretically (representation theory, studies about networks, cartography, etc.) and experimentally (development of methods to assess the relevance of each representation depending on the target audiences) how to create effective community mapping. Its global ambition is to inform a theory of design helping to understand how certain community representations can lead to actual cognitive shifts in the way a community is understood.

Keywords

Data Visualization, Representation of Organizations, Networks, Cartography, Materializations, Interaction Design, Text Mining.

Bio

Dario Rodighiero is PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of EPFL, attending the Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the Cities. He is employed as designer at the College of Humanities in the DHLAB where his supervisor, Frédéric Kaplan, is director. Previously Dario joined the team of AIME, headed by Bruno Latour, at the médialab of Sciences Po and has been computer scientist for 4 years at the European Commission. He created the brand design for CHI2013 in Paris and for DH2014 in Lausanne.

Location:

Room 101, FBK North Building