Eliciting public participation through information design
Public participation is crucial in the present-day context of increasingly complex scenarios of data-driven approaches in various domains. I will discuss the challenges and exploration of information design approaches through case examples from my teaching and practice-based design research projects at Aalto University.
Case examples: Information design for Elections, Air Quality, Health, Public transport.
Rupesh Vyas is an associate professor at Aalto University, responsible for the information design focus area within the Visual Communication Design major. He is also leading the practice-based Design research projects in information design at the Department of Art and Media.
Rupesh teaches information design courses and is engaged in collaborative design research with many public sector organizations in Finland. He led the collaborative project with city of Helsinki to create an interactive visualisation of Air Quality data for eliciting public participation. He is the driving force behind the collaborative design research projects with FINNGEN for creating future tools of visualizing genetic data for scientific discoveries.
Rupesh is also involved in organizing the Visualizing Knowledge conference, the biennial conference held at Aalto University, focused on various topics of Information Design and Data Visualization, where student work, as well as ongoing research is presented along with talks by international experts.
Previously, he was a senior faculty at the National Institute of Design, India, responsible for developing and teaching information and interaction design research and education. He has contributed significantly to some of the major projects with national importance in India, which includes the Design for Census of India 2011, Design of Population Register, Design of Multipurpose National Identity Card and unifying Information and visual design standards for Driver’s License.