As designers we are living the most interesting and challenging age of the news industry. The technology used in writing is undergoing a huge transformation, addressing itself to a multitude of languages. The great challenge of our time is to combine different languages, in order to increase knowledge and understanding, to inform and clarify.

According to Franchi, reporting is not merely filing a story once, but rather telling a continuous narrative in a way that is most relevant for a broad range of traditional and digital media—from breaking news to analysis, from interviews to commentaries, from photo essays and illustrations to information graphics and interactive visualizations of data.

Availability: 20 seats only
Date: June, 19-20, 2014 (2 full days workshop)
Venue: Talent Garden CoWorkin Campus, via Merano, 16 – 20127 Milano, Italy

Photo gallery

Contents

The workshop aims at highlighting the potential of #InfographicThinking as modality to approach and interpret reality: not only limited to the traditional graphic design disciplines, today infographic is able to translate a complex issue into an effective and recognizable visual form, producing new knowledge and revealing new meanings.

Objectives

The course aims to strengthen the capacity:
— to understand the evolution of the visual communication languages, from the origin until nowadays increasing quantity and complexity of data and information produced
— to develop a whole ‘infographic project’, approaching the various process phases critically and properly, from the initial access to data, their understanding, manipulation, interpretation until the final communication by using the appropriate visual representation
— to conceive infographic as a process of visual production able to generate knowledge and better understanding of reality
— to realize how infographics have wide ranging applications beyond news dissemination, in several other domains such as scientific visualization, product design, education, information technology, business communication and entertainment

Didactic Structure

The didactic structure of the workshop reproduces the process to create an infographic, providing participants with the needed theoretical background and practical skills. Day by day, the different project phases will be approached through the direct project experience: starting from the extraction, selection and interpretation of data until the organization of the contents into the most effective visual form, able to combine simplicity and complexity of the communication. For each project phase, the related conceptual basis will be investigated and practical guidelines will be provided; professionals specialized on specific project aspects will be invited in order to relate their experience and works.
In terms of tools and languages, not only the common data collecting methodologies and traditional representation practices will be presented but also the latest technologies and applications to record and visualize data will be introduced.

Featuring

Workshop participants will be divided into small groups and under Franchi’s guidance, produce an infographic for a given topic to be announced at the workshop. Similar to the other workshops, one final infographic will be chosen and collaboratively developed further into a feature story.

Refreshments and light lunch will be served throughout the days.
An aperitif will be served on the roof garden of the venue at the end of the workshop.

See the complete Infographic Thinking workshop fact sheet

Read more about this workshop at 2014.frontiersofinteraction.com

Read more about previous editions