Alessio Caccamo
Institutional sustainability communication operates at a scale that is both global and, for most audiences, epistemically inert: aggregate carbon statistics describe a planetary condition that resists recognition in the body, in shared space, or in the relational field of a community that knows its own habits. Participatory data physicalization (PDP) has emerged as a productive response to this failure, yet the field lacks a consolidated framework for mapping how participation scale and rhetorical strategy combine in artefacts oriented towards environmental engagement. This paper addresses two interconnected research questions: (RQ1) what structural asymmetries characterise the landscape of PDP practice oriented towards environmental engagement, and what design positions remain unoccupied? (RQ2) How can the identified absent position be operationalised through an exhibit design that makes its encoding logic explicit and transferable? A PRISMA-compliant systematic literature review of 30 papers constructs a two-dimensional taxonomy whose axes — participation scale and rhetorical strategy — reveal a structural asymmetry: the combination of community-specific primary data, exclusively analogue materiality, exhibit-based spatial organisation, and formal educational institutional deployment is absent from the extant literature. Fa “CO₂” Conti is presented as a research-through-design proposition that occupies and interrogates this absent position. The project translates an original dataset collected from 72 university students across five habitual domains into an analogue five-station exhibit, documented through a three-dimensional semiotic grid whose morphological, syntactic, and semantic dimensions are grounded in the visual variables tradition. The grid is proposed as a transferable analytical instrument for hybrid physical–2D data artefacts. Qualitative observations from deployment suggest that the analogue, situated, community-specific approach produces forms of relational awareness that aggregate-statistical communication consistently fails to engender.
Keywords: participatory data physicalization; data-graphicacy; sustainability literacy; exhibit design; environmental communication; systemic design; taxonomy; research-through-design; visual variables