MISSING INDEX
Intentional illegibility as a critical design strategy in the face of educational data voids
Alessio Caccamo, Lidia Odierna
Sapienza Università di Roma — Design della Comunicazione Visiva e Multimediale — alessio.caccamo@uniroma1.it, lidiaodierna@gmail.com
KEYWORD
#critical information design
#data feminism #Scholasticide
#intentional illegibility; #research-through-design
ABSTRACT
The absence of data is not a neutral condition; it is evidence of a power that operates through omission. Missing Index is the prototype of an interactive platform that collects infographics and proposes intentional illegibility as a critical strategy. In contexts such as “scholasticide,” gender-based exclusion, and authoritarian censorship, distortion, progressive occlusion, and obscuration (redaction) transform visual friction into both a data-encoding method and a rhetorical device, making structural violence epistemically visible.
CREATIVE PROCESS
Using a research-through-design methodology, five historical scenarios characterized by a verifiable absence of data were selected; for each, we examined the documentation, analyzed the gap, and translated the corresponding mechanism of the void into a visual grammar, based on caviardage and typographic dissolution, employing exclusively black characters on a white background.
IMPLICATIONS & NEXT STEPS
This project starts from an awareness of privilege: studying at a public university, in a country where education is constitutionally guaranteed, is never a given. The infographics do not aim at completeness but at questioning which data exist, are collected or concealed. Missing Index will always be incomplete yet evolving: an archive of absence that aspires to become superfluous.
References
Onuoha, M. (2016). The library of missing datasets. Retrieved [giorno, mese, anno] from https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets
Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2007). Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, CA, USA, 493–502. https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240704
D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
De Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.