Close-up of the EU conveyor belt

Waste Streams – Tracing Romania's Tangled Trash is an installation part of the exhibition Turn Signals – Design is not a Dashboard on view at FABER, Timișoara, from September to November 2023.

For years, the Romanian press has decried the nation’s portrayal as ‘the dump of Europe’. All types of waste, both legal and illegal, find their way into Romania via boats and trucks, often facilitated by corruption, economic interests, and political connections. However, the fate of this waste within the country remains largely undisclosed. Waste Streams – Tracing Romania’s Tangled Trash investigated the waste management system by analysing statistics, policies, and legislation within Romania and across Europe. Illustrated in the form of a waste sorting facility, one conveyor belt is a visual representation of Europe’s waste production, export strategies, and associated directives, shedding light on continental waste dynamics. Another conveyor belt focuses on Romania’s waste infrastructure, and its health and environmental impacts. Drawing on data, news reports, and local knowledge, the project converges diverse entry points into a single stream of information. When viewed as a continuous flow of data involving imports, exports, and materials, the waste system is acknowledged as a trade mechanism, wherein waste functions as a commodity.

Authors: Cinzia Bongino (designer), Versavia Ancușa (computer science lecturer).
See more on Behance.

End of the conveyor belt

Map showcasing electronic manufacturers located in Romania

Stacked bar chart displaying waste generated in Europe by economic activity

Installation view

Opening title for one of the short films

Book cover

Torinodesign.info lists experts in design, communication, and image operating in Piedmont, Italy, organized by fields and services offered. The website is designed as a tool for clients, students, and professionals. It lists democratically by alphabetical order and does not give more or less visibility to websites optimized for search engine algorithms.

The project has been selected for the exhibition Italy: A New Collective Landscape on show at ADI Design Museum in Milan from April to September 2023. For the special occasion, we printed out the content of the website in the form of an address book, listing all the profiles registered between 2020 and 2022.

The typography pairs Forma DJR and Canada Type’s Recta – two digital revivals of typefaces that originated at Nebiolo in Turin.

See more on Behance, and see a previously published contribution about the Torinodesign.info website.

Spread

Close-up of a page showing all the freelances

Data visualization

The exhibition GEO—DESIGN: Budget Airlines. We Are All The Jet Set* considers how “cheap” is more than just a price: it is a way of looking at the world. Nine research projects demonstrate how low-cost carriers impact everyday life at many scales of observation, from airport infrastructures and aircraft models to labour negotiations and digital services, from international boundaries and corporate sovereignty to marketing strategies and environmental impact. Suisse Int’l is used throughout for all typography.

Budget airlines, no-frills flights, peanut fares are a few of the familiar names used to describe low-cost carriers. The Ryanair Group carried the most passengers in Europe in 2019 and 2020, some 30 years after the then obscure Irish company rebranded itself as “Europe’s first low-fares airline”. It pioneered an operational model oriented towards a singular goal of cheap flights, but many others have followed, including EasyJet and Wizz Air in Europe. Operating on a business model that minimises operational costs, unbundles fares, reduces customer services and decentralises routes, budget airlines have not only shaped the world-wide aviation industry as we know it, but an entire travel culture. The European consciousness and landscape have been fundamentally transformed by minor local airports being plucked from obscurity and ‘abroad’ becoming a commodity rather than a luxury.

The fifth chapter to emerge from the Design Academy Eindhoven’s GEO—DESIGN exhibition platform, the nine projects were selected by open-call, and developed by 13 alumni over the past three months. GEO—DESIGN: Budget Airlines was presented at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, from 9 October to 14 November 2021.

*(Taxes, fees and charges apply)

Moving in Stasis was a hybrid exhibition by 60 graduates from the Design Academy Eindhoven, shown in 2021 at Gallery 3 By You, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. The exhibition and public programme revisited and recast the Academy’s Master graduation projects from 2020. Until that time, the projects had been kept in storage, awaiting their moment of display. In collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut, sixty works were transplanted to Gallery 3 By You, six months after the moment of graduation.

Shown here is the digital part of the exhibition, as shown on a (no longer available) dedicated website. Arial is used for all typography.

Ex-Names aims to make more visible a common practice among vessel owners: the change of name and register. Here are presented a selection of 10 vessels that changed identity very often in recent years, listed until March 2019. Every ship has its identification number: why so many changes of names too?

Creating a “flag of flags” is a way to reconstruct the identity of a ship. By putting together the change of register (flag state) and name (ownership), it is possible to visualize the number of owners and countries of registration of the vessel. The length of each flag represents the timespan the ship sailed under specific jurisdiction.

Made as a student project at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2019.

Words from Animal Spirits' website:

Animal Spirits is a factory of unruly objects: it creates products, experiences and mythologies that enhance the capacity of individual action in the public space. It is conceived as a series of capsule collections in constant evolution, limited editions of customisable products with strong narrative and symbolic elements, able to transform the imagination of its owner into that of a political animal ready for action.

It's a particular project created by Mali Weil, an artistic collective based in Trento.

The Weapons’ Reputation. An Investigation into the Geopolitics of Arms Trade was made as a Master thesis in Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, 2020. Sequel Sans is used throughout in a single weight.

The project questions the integrity of the arms trade as legal commerce of tools of warfare. Every conventional weapon is produced and sold with a license; nonetheless, there is an enormous lack of responsibility among those who work in the defence industry. As a case study, the ongoing conflict in Yemen (2015-present) is examined through the type of weaponry employed. The research has been translated into a 17 minutes film, extended by a repository of weapons employed in the conflict. The repository is available online at weaponsreputation.com.

The website satellitecharts.xyz examines current and past artificial satellites orbiting around Earth, pointing out how our terrestrial life became so dependent on what we sent out in space. With topics ranging from space exploration to space pollution, communication, and warfare, the data visualization functions as an index to unlock related stories. More than eight thousand satellites are plotted on the chart: the data show how many satellites are still operational or decayed, who launched them, and in which years.

Displaying such information (all typeset in Supreme) on a flat design allows the viewer to zoom in and out in time. In about 70 years of space history, we slowly built an extension of Earth's infrastructure above our head, an extra level of data collection and exchange. Satellites are essential technologies that must be constantly safeguarded, especially from human threats: jobs, services, social gatherings, transport, and communications are strictly dependent on the network of artificial bodies monitoring the planet. It is impossible to imagine our current living standards and global connections without the data transmission between satellites and Earth stations. This is what keeps the world spinning.

This is an ongoing project: more charts and topics will be added in the following months, focusing on the geography of launch sites, the past and current debris floating in space, and the names of satellites and missions.

Identity and web design/development for Dr. Francesco Matarazzo, an eye doctor in Naples, Italy. Design and illustrations by Cinzia Bongino, using ES Allianz (Extraset) throughout. Project management and development by Norma.

See more images on the Behance page.