Pad (Dec 2019)
The Seascape beyond the Physical Dimension. How Data Design could Display Complex Marine Environments
Abstract
The paper addresses a reflection and explores the intangible dimension of the Mediterranean Sea, in other words, everything that lies beneath and above the surface of the water. Reasoning on how this hidden dimension is a well-defined landscape outlined by many scientific studies due to the complexity not always accessible. The attempt to draw a palimpsest of levels for the understanding of this liquid volume inevitably passes through the design of tools needed to understand and study the raw data and how it can serve to build a “physical story” useful to tell and reveal what is not perceptible to the naked eye. The effort is to hybridise the scientific disciplines of landscape architecture and data design, indeed the understanding of physical dynamics and how they can be returned in physical form, in order to open a strand of research in support of certain scientific disciplines such as marine biology, meteorology or physics of marine environments and so on. Moving from these premises and in order to validate the proposed, some examples are presented which give evidence of how data design and analytical sensitivity can merge starting from scientific assessments.
