Soundscape and Dataviz for Traditional Craft: Innovation by Design

Under the impact of the contemporary craft technologies, traditional craft processes can effectively achieve sustainable development if they continuously strengthen design innovation and actively meet the needs of the market and customers. This study starts from the assumption that in the traditional product design process, a lot of data information will be generated, that can be actively collect and sort out to conduct in-depth mining and statistical analysis. The relation between traditional craft, design and data has ancient historical roots: in the fifteenth century the Incas used threads, ropes, and knots to convey information. These artefacts were called quipu. Appeared as dense curtains and contained several types of information. They were tight narratives told through a different form of visual language: a data visualization, as we currently know. Valorizing and updating this relation, data could convey the form of the artifact but at the same time is itself a conveyor of the history of a place and a population. Data can be transposed into the artifact through weaving, engraving, painting, and so on, becoming part of artifacts DNA. These are not only numbers but also words, movements, sounds, thus shifted from a purely extractive- statistical view to an ecosystemic-humanistic view. In this data galaxy, a novel filed of exploration is the soundscape that can represents a new frontier still limited explored but that strongly represents the concept of ecosystem. From the perspective of acoustic ecology, the soundscape reflects the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Its graphic representation (sonogram) is the visible manifestation of the sonic data and can reveal to the observer's gaze the acoustic identity of a place as well as the quality of the relationship between the community and its surroundings: if this relationship is well balanced, the sonogram becomes a data visualization of a positive connection among living organisms and inspire sustainable design processes (of crafts, production spaces, settlements, cities). The contribution aims to understand how the soundscape, understood as a set of data (in relation to space and time) in the form of sound, can be the vehicle of new techniques and new forms in the processing of traditional craft in an evolutionary design perspective.