The Role of Infographics in the Representation of Design Research

Abstract

This paper examines what the “narrative task” of Communication Design, in its infographic declination, may be in the different stages of “doing research through design”. That is to say that - crossing simultaneously the fields of theory and praxis - design research is required to elaborate a visual language capable of coherently presenting the entirety of its development (from the meta-design to final products) made up of data processed in the ante, during and post phases. In other words, the actual, useful and inalienable results of doing research must fully include the communicative and visual design of its “process” that unfolds throughout its desk and field actions. The theme of the “representation of research” therefore becomes the core of the paper, which highlights how the descriptive development of the actions and manifestations of research proceeds through visual models known as process and result models. What is proposed, in fact, in this contribution, is a reflection on the visual models that describe research in its phases, through different tools such as scientific drawing, hypothetigraphy and infographic presentation, the latter to be understood as a conceptual and visual synthesis of complex processes.