PART ONE
In my personal practice, I tend to gravitate towards work that explores the minutiae of felt experiences. This often means that my research, referential materials and enquiries are less concerned with statistical information, leaning heavily qualitative over quantitative. Methods of Contextualizing asked that I disrupt this approach by tethering my iterations to a fixed dataset and its constraints. As the work expanded, I realized that this wasn’t an exercise in abandoning my approach, but rather about integrating new methods, cultivating new pathways within it. Working with this dataset produced critical conversations amongst our group that explored structure, responsibility and legibility.
We quickly realized that our collective relationship to flight emissions was both shared and situated, given that we are all international students. We had experienced and navigated the information that we were interrogating. This forced us to consider responsibility at individual and systemic scales, using our collective positionality as both a research and design tool.
In this sense, this exercise deepened both my practice and my relationship to climate justice by pushing me to consider responsibility as an active factor that design can assess, reframe or contextualize. This work taught me how to move from simply presenting complex data towards interrogating positioned, interpretive iterations that motivate wider structural questions.
Annotated Bibliography
From the reading list
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production
Johanna Drucker
Initially, we chose to explore our own interpretations of the student flight emissions data. I chose to design an application that could simultaneously function as an educational resource and as a tool to optimize the data being illustrated. The aim of this application is to encourage engagement with climate change awareness across the UAL student body in a comprehensive and playful way. In order to better understand how to visualize the dataset, I used this text as a reference. Johanna Drucker theorizes that the act of visualizing information is a knowledge producing act rather than a neutral one. This perspective informed the ways in which I engaged with our data, ranging from both practical and conceptual explorations. Additionally, there were several critical findings that related to my personal interest in visualizing unseen or hidden information.
Reference
Drucker, J. (2014) Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* I really enjoyed this text, so purchase a copy and referenced the entire book, not just the excerpt provided in the reading list.
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
Donna Haraway
In Situated Knowledges, Haraway examines the notion that visual systems are active. She uses various kinds of lenses, insect eyes, satellites and probes to argue that the ways in which we see are structured via apparatuses and translations. “All eyes… are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing… There is no unmediated photograph.” As we developed our work, individually and collectively, this helped to direct the departure from presenting data to devising a tool through which to see it, largely in this context through the “Authorized Movement’ metaphor and our experiential positions.
Additionally, when applied to climate justice, Haraway’s main thesis could be perceived as a way to reframe objectivity. By interrogating and interpreting a fixed dataset, objectivity could be something earned through location, partiality and being answerable rather than performing neutrality. This relates to our collective positionality as something shared and situated, and expands on the ways in which research can be used as a design tool.
Reference
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.
EXTERNAL TEXTS
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
Geoffrey C. Bowker; Susan Leigh Star
In Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Bowker and Star argue that categorizations and definitions are not merely records. They steer our perceptions, effectively shaping what is noticeable, measurable and actionable. In this sense, data systems arrange what becomes visible, or quantifiable. Additionally, they can assume or contain moral and ethical values, not merely data.
This struck me in particular because the Authorized Movement Pack that my team and I developed sought, in part, to consider the hidden context of the information we were working with. A recurring topic of conversation was responsibility in context to these flights. Should we not return home over break? Should we feel guilty for choosing an academic institution abroad? It became evident quite quickly that we wanted to expand on systems, rather than pinning responsibility on the individual. It was important that these enquiries be very evident in our studio work, while avoiding creating a reproduction of the classification effects we were interrogating.
Reference
Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
Sara Ahmed
Prior to the start of this project, I wasn’t aware that UAL had a net zero team. After the briefing, I was curious about how the projected timeline seemed to fluctuate substantially. Factors like budget constraints, inaccurate data or the ability to follow through with effective plans seem to drastically alter the goals set forth. I wanted to explore how often net zero goals are successfully met in relation to how these projections are communicated, especially externally facing.
Ahmed explores how the implementation of institutional policies or commitments functions practically. Her observation is that there is often a divide between what is said and what is done. She refers to this as “non-performatives” which she describes as, “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse… [does not produce] …the effects that it names.” (Ahmed, 2012, p.117). A projected plan, or commitment can be perceived as evidential without defined transformations of hidden systems. While this text specifically relates to race and diversity, her point is still applicable. Our purpose, as graphic communicators, is to synthesize, interpret and publish complexity. It involves a level of sanitization that can obscure uncertainty.
I want to be clear that this reflection is not a criticism of UAL’s net zero team, but rather an observation about how institutions project certainty when the underlying systems may not or cannot uphold it.
Reference
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
PROJECTS & PRACTICES
Forensic Architecture
Forensic Architecture is a research-based agency that prioritizes legibility through spatial/data analysis and publishing. Their approach is rooted in producing and providing evidence through platforming uncertainty. Simply put, their aim is to make complexity intelligible. Their ethos reads: “Our mandate is to develop, employ, and disseminate new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence.” (Forensic Architecture, n.d., ‘Who are we?’)
A key factor in their practice is how they map correlations between actions and outcomes so that responsibility is understood as systemic and structural. This fundamentally ties to the work that we developed for Methods of Contextualizing, especially considering our specific prompt. Presenting raw, complex data risks the viewer interpreting facts as neutral, with the potential of responsibility being perceived as individual. Referencing Forensic Architecture proved to be a strong research model for exploring ways to integrate literacy into our collective designed response so that interpretation is made accountable.
Reference
Forensic Architecture (n.d.) Forensic Architecture. Available at: https://forensic-architecture.org/ (Accessed: 27 February 2026).
Carbon Bombs
Carbon Bombs is a project that explores large-scale oil and fossil fuel ventures taking place globally through investigatory publishing. This website uses a map as an interactive interface that allows viewers to navigate clickable links with detailed information pertaining to the activity in the selected area. By placing the focus on large-scale emissions contributors, Carbon Bombs redirects responsibility back to the main drivers and decision makers that impact climate change the most.
While continuing to interrogate the through-lines of responsibility throughout our process, Carbon Bombs informed how we repositioned our flight emissions dataset as institutional and indicative of structural dependency. Specifically, it helped define what our data could and could not address through implied actions within the context of international study. For example, does the data imply that student’s should change behavior or should institutions consider implementing structural changes?
Reference
Data4Good, Éclaircies, Reclaim Finance and LINGO (n.d.) [CarbonBombs.org](http://CarbonBombs.org). Available at: [https://carbonbombs.org/](https://carbonbombs.org/) (Accessed: 27 February 2026).
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