Affiliation: Politecnico di Milano

The Fog of Finance

As part of this project we created an “Atlas of Offshore FDI” exploring financial relations between states through the flows of money from foreign direct investment (FDI). Its specificity is the effort to visualize the combinations and modifications of the flows of money for making sense of transnational economic activity as well as visual practices for representing uncertainty. While public data practices often emphasise and value the production of certainty , this project considers what data projects may learn from diverse cultures for visually representing, managing and articulating uncertainty.

It is a research project done in collaboration with the Tax Justice Network, a network of researchers and research centres, and the Public Data Lab. The experimental visual model is designed and developed by DensityDesign Research Lab.

For further details see:

Save Our Air

Supported by OrganiCity and developed by the Public Data Lab, SaveOurAir is an exploration of the social and political aspects of “smart cities”. Its specificity is the effort to use digital data to stir (rather than settle) urban debate and to nurture (rather than purify) their multiple attachments.

Focussing on air quality, SaveOurAir explored three ways to make urban data more “local” and “politically relevant” and developed three experiments in data activation.

Chiara Piva

DensityDesign Lab – Politecnico di Milano

Gabriele Colombo

Gabriele Colombo is a researcher in the field of Communication Design, with a focus on information visualisation and visual methods for social research. He is a postdoctoral research fellow in the European research project INCOMMON, hosted by IUAV, University of Venice. From 2019 to 2021, he has been a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, In the context of the European project “ODYCCEUS – Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces”. He is affiliated with DensityDesign, a research lab at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano, he is part of the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and he has a long-standing collaboration with the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano (2018). At Politecnico di Milano he is also a lecturer in the Communication Design Master Degree, where he teaches Digital Methods and Communication Design. His research and teaching activities revolve around the design of visual tools in support of digital social research, focusing on the design of novel strategies for the communication, exploration, analysis and valorisation of collections of images and videos.