Design Research

Research set-up project

Caroline Feder, Research Associate, Eric Andreae, Research Associate, Simona Boscardin, Assistant, Katja Knöllinger, Assistant

Cast / Audiovisual Media und Knowledge Visaualization

How does trust emerge in a saturated and increasingly automated information landscape? Transparency by Design is an interdisciplinary research project that explores how design, journalistic practice, and science communication can jointly contribute to trust-enhancing knowledge dissemination. Building on an exploratory preliminary study, the project investigates how processes, contextualization, and collaboration can be made visible and translated into concrete design approaches.

Today’s information landscape is shaped by information overload, new modes of distribution, and the growing difficulty of distinguishing between human- and AI-generated content. Trust is therefore built less through individual facts than through comprehensible processes, contextualization, and design. Transparency by Design is an interdisciplinary research project at the intersection of design, journalism, and science communication. In an exploratory preliminary study, workshops with experts from design, media practice, and research were used to identify and jointly analyse key challenges of trust.

The findings show that trust does not emerge from transparency alone, but from orientation, contextualization, and clear models of roles and collaboration between editorial teams, designers, and researchers. The next phase of the project builds on these insights. Its aim is to systematically deepen these findings and translate them, through collaborative processes, into concrete design strategies, prototypes, and transferable recommendations for practice. In this way, the project contributes applied development and establishes robust foundations for trust-enhancing media and knowledge formats.