Reality Check - Information Design

REALITY CHECK - INFORMATION DESIGN

Group project by: Ana Francisca Alemão, Beatriz Mesquita, Cláudio Gomes, Pedro Guimarães

In this day and age, general curiosity is a fast-moving factor that doesn't quite evolve to a level of interest and devotion to subjects that really matter. This short period of diligence also coincides with the small surges of solidarity that appear sporadically and that, in the end, turn out to be ephemeral and momentary.

Based on the analysis of information from the Google Trends platform from a perspective of developed and developing countries, events - and respective movements - were collected from the last 10 years that continue (or should continue) to have relevance today but have gone through peaks of interest that quickly went into decline.

This project is based on “Missing Stories”, which were interpreted as stories or events that fell into oblivion. These are matters that were left in the moments when they happened or that were remembered (for multiple reasons) and, shortly afterwards, were put on a long - sometimes infinite - period of stand-by, together with the importance they carried or carry. The Google Trends platform allowed a thorough analysis and collection of situations to be carried out, in order to create a complete and reliable database of search terms that revealed these moments in which there were sudden and short peaks of interest in a time span of 10 years. (2012-22). This means of collecting information allowed the research to be as close as possible to a global approach, since the subjects are also of global coverage - even so, universal language is not always absolute and obstacles such as access to the internet or even to information are factors that can harm the attempt to reach the world.

The events are presented along with the analysis of its adherence - period of peaks and the speed of its decay. In this project it is possible to recognize that human curiosity is fast and ephemeral and, also, that the media have an excessive hand in what we know and in the devotion that is given to subjects that should, without a shadow of a doubt, be taken into account.

Information is (unfortunately) made of peaks: we absorb it, we have a very short surge of solidarity - when it comes to highly relevant human causes - and we quickly let it fall into a (mostly) perpetual forgetfulness.

The graph presented is based on the opacity variations, where each one represents a specific value on the adherence of the respective subject in each week, all this coming from the Google Trends database.

This way, it was possible to graphically create a chart that can be manipulated in several ways, containing its reading and its informative value at all times.

The collected and researched subjects were organized in categories that identify them in general, although some of them could also fit into other categories. This platform allows you to know the subjects and filter them according to the categories presented.