by Link Campus University
Infographics are powerful and effective tools to convey key information and engaging people in stories about natural and cultural heritage. They can be defined as information visualizations using text, images, and data represented in a structured way for making a concept more readable and easily understandable.
A well-designed infographic can improve the user experience of people with a specific heritage or environment and, consequently, with the organization it refers to. So, they can really contribute to spread awareness about and promote it.
The Infographic course created by Link Campus University and available on the O-City Learn platform aims to teach students how to design and realize such powerful communicative tools by introducing to people, even without any expertise in the field, basic knowledge about principles of visual communication and human-centered design.
On September and October 2021, two workshop based on the Infographic course from O-City that involved two different groups of students coming from Europe were delivered by Valentina Volpi, teacher at Link Campus University.
In detail, the first workshop was delivered during the Youth Training Exchange “Know the Heritage!” as part of a collaboration between O-City and another Erasmus+ project: Culture.EDU. Learners and their tutors came from an Italian foundation, Fondazione Ugo Spirito e Renzo De Felice, and a Bulgarian association, Piligrimi, committed in preserving and promoting cultural heritage.
The second workshop was part of the Soft Skills and Orientation Path (Percorso per le Competenze Trasversali e l’Orientamento – PCTO) delivered by Link Campus University to the students from two classes, one of the Classicals and the other of the Arts lyceum, of the Istituto Sant’Orsola, a Secondary School in Rome. Some teachers from the Institute took part in this learning path created in the Orange Planet to support their students in completing their infographics.
During the workshops students attended lectures and did practical activities aimed at the implementation on the O-City World platform of multimedia based on Infographic. The learners worked in teams on real infographic projects about a selected group of heritages in the Italian Region of Lazio, going through the different phases of the user-centered design process, from the prototype to the finished infographic.
The two workshops managed to spread awareness and build competences on creativity applied to cultural heritage, both for students and their teachers or tutors. Learners successfully experiment new methodologies and tools for developing multimedia products in the creative economy.
In the end, 12 new multimedia (infographics) for the O-City World platform have been created by students, and 6 new cities (and their cultural elements) entered in the O-City World.
Discover them on the O-City World platform!
Figure 1: An example of gathering and organizing information for the infographic project.
Figure 2: An example of sketching a low-fidelity prototype of the infographic project.
In the next few weeks, a final event to present the results and award the best infographics will be organized, as a celebration of the competences acquired by students in the learning path created in the Orange Planet!