Seventeenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

In the last years motion design practices have played a significant role in advertising societal issues and promoting social agendas as they are direct and visually appealing tools for helping to improve local, regional, and global issues related to public health, poverty and community development (Maselli & Panadisi 2022, Normoyle 2019, Resnick 2016). In this paper we consider motion design social agenda in educational scenarios using different narrative strategies and visual languages to address complex contexts and visually translating the values and concerns of non-profit organizations and NGOs (Alam 2022). After a quick overview of successful videos produced for supporting organizations by triggering a strong emotional response – such as Caritas Internationals, Childline, Greenpeace, The Girl Effect, Refugee Council – the paper reports a didactic experiment that engaged design students in producing animated artifacts to narrate and promote the Italian NGO SftruttaZero. SfruttaZero is a cooperative project developed in south Italy that involves migrants, precarious farmers and unemployed young people in producing local products with the aims to build solidarity relationships, fair working environment and sustainable economies in the area. Produced outputs challenge motion design’s informative power, visual qualities and technical features and address the topic under different perspectives, spotlighting either the sustainable production process or the organization’s social responsibility. The paper, in conclusion, aims at demonstrating that motion design should integrate social agendas within educational context as students are more likely exposed to opportunities for experimenting their design knowledge and skills to support socially responsible actions.