Alessio Caccamo and Lidia Odierna
The absence of data is not a neutral condition. The missing educational datasets, the systematic failure to measure literacy rates, the under-registration of bombed schools and expelled students, and the statistical erasure of those who never entered the counting apparatus collectively constitute evidence of power operating through omission. This paper introduces Missing Index, an interactive digital platform developed through a research-through-design methodology, which conceptualises educational data voids as systemic design artefacts and advances intentional illegibility as a critical strategy for making structural violence epistemically visible. Informed by the critical information design tradition (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Onuoha, 2016) and by the concept of epistemicide (De Sousa Santos, 2014), the research examines three interconnected registers through which educational data deserts are produced: the physical destruction of educational infrastructure during armed conflict (scholasticide); the institutionalised exclusion of women from formal education systems; and the deliberate censorship of knowledge enacted by authoritarian regimes. In each scenario, the platform operationalises illegibility as a design variable — deploying distortions, progressive text occlusion, overlapping and disappearing data layers, and caviardage — so that visual friction functions simultaneously as data encoding and rhetorical device. The paper contributes to the RSD symposium theme of Shades of Systemic Design along two axes: it advances a methodological argument that visualisation practice within a systemic design framework must account not only for the complexity of available data but also for the political conditions under which data is or is not produced; and it proposes illegibility as a designerly ontology, a way of knowing and representing the world that foregrounds relational interdependencies between information structures, power, and the bodies they render visible or invisible.
Keywords: critical information design, data feminism, Scholasticide, research-through-design, epistemic plurality.