Abstract:

In contemporary digital contexts, Information Designers (IDes) play an increasingly important role in observing, interpreting, and translating the dynamics of online spaces. Social media are non-neutral environments where communities construct shared meanings while information, opinions, and cultural models of varying reliability circulate. In this scenario, digital trends can become polarising and problematic. The Media and Information Literacy (MIL) framework offers a reference for navigating these environments critically. This study examines the relationship between Information Design (ID) and MIL and proposes a didactical approach that builds on IDes’ competences to design effective MIL artefacts. Which didactical approach can prepare ID students to design MIL artefacts?

We present an approach developed within the Final Synthesis course of the Master’s Degree in Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano based on Knowledge Objectives (KO): statements specifying the knowledge an ID artefact aims to activate in its audience through visual features called Knowledge Activators (KA). The goal is to support students in translating their competences into practice by designing ID artefacts for MIL contexts, as devices conceived for and with the public that make knowledge accessible, interpretable, and durable. Students investigate eight trends across online platforms and produce exhibition artefacts designed as vehicles of knowledge for a heterogeneous public. These include toxic work culture, carnivore diet, clean girls, mukbang, AI slop, tradwives, gymbros, and Ozempic. Our approach unfolds across four phases, each defining aims, methods, and outputs that support the development of the final artefacts.
1) Designing with Data. Students individually develop a data visualisation based on a dataset of their choice. Conceived as a sandbox, this phase offers a safe space to experiment and learn how to translate a KO into a data visualisation.
2) Data Design. In a research question-driven process, each group investigates a chosen trend producing a digital report. This phase builds students’ expertise on the topic while deriving findings that can be translated into clear KO grounded in the data.
3) Data to Knowledge. This phase overlaps with the next one. Students develop and formalise the KO guiding the artefact’s design during Data Publics, and define an ad hoc evaluation methodology to assess, during the exhibition, whether the artefacts activate the intended knowledge.
4) Data Publics. Students translate their analysed datasets into exhibition artefacts. The phase focuses on transforming KO into design artefacts while iteratively refining them throughout the process, and on developing students’ ability to sample and remix their datasets to shape KA.

By presenting the outcomes of each phase and discussing both successes and limitations, we show how this methodology fosters a practice of ID that is critical, traceable, and open to evaluation. These qualities place ID competences at the centre of MIL initiatives, where the role of IDes remains underexplored.

Within this framework, KO functions as both didactic and evaluative devices: they help students articulate design intentions and assess whether artefacts effectively convey the intended knowledge. Although grounded in a single course, the results suggest the approach could extend to other educational contexts, acting as a methodological bridge between ID education and MIL.

Keywords:

Information Design Education, Design Education, Data visualisation, Knowledge Objectives, Media and Information Literacy.