What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to explore how design can effectively engage with uncertainty across various contexts.

May 31, 2026DIID0 citationsOpen Access

Designing with Uncertainty: From Visual Accounting to AI-Augmented Reasoning

PCPaolo CiuccarelliUniversidad del Noreste

Key Points

The aim is to explore how design can effectively engage with uncertainty across various contexts.
Analyzed two contexts: data visualization at DensityDesign and AI product design at Northeastern University.
Identified a three-stage evolution involving recognition, accounting, and negotiation of uncertainty.
Developed computational methods preserving ambiguity and frameworks for evaluating design reasoning.
Visualization transformed into visual accounting, enhancing inspectability of algorithmic operations.
Implemented multi-label architectures that reveal latent user needs.
Found uncertainty impacts designers across multiple registers, enabling integrated methods to tackle contemporary design challenges.

Abstract

This paper examines how design can productively engage with uncertainty, drawing on direct involvement in two research contexts: the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) and Northeastern University, Center for Design. Despite their different domains (data visualization and AI-augmented product design) both reveal a three-stage evolution: recognizing uncertainty as inherent to complex phenomena; accounting for its origin within socio-technical systems; negotiating it through collective practice. At DensityDesign, visualization became visual accounting: making algorithmic operations inspectable through exhibitions, workshops, and frictional interfaces. At Northeastern, developing computational methods that preserve ambiguity: multi-label architectures surfacing latent user needs; frameworks evaluating how designers reason. These trajectories reveal uncertainty as affecting designers across technical, epistemological, affective, and systemic registers, opening possibilities for integrating transferable methods and practices to help design work within the irreducible complexity of contemporary challenges.

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