Empowering migrant women through design

The resilience of women

Our collaboration with IRES Piemonte began in February 2020, just before the pandemic. The goal was to design a communication strategy for ALFa that would tell the stories of resilient migrant women while steering clear of stereotypes and clichés.

How? By combining a participatory photography project, a storytelling website and an exhibition.

Let the stories come from the women

We soon realised we lacked the stories and emotions to build a narrative. So we designed a participatory photography workshop based on instant cameras to collect them.

With photographer Claudia Corrent and journalist Clara Attene, we ran three workshops in three different places, gathering points of view that traditional interviews could never reach.

Hundreds of instant pictures, voice messages and thoughts. How to tell them? We built a scrollytelling story, an exercise in data storytelling, organised in chapters that combine insights, instant pictures and digital photos. Each chapter focuses on one part of the women's everyday lives: learning Italian, housing, self-confidence, passions, the future (photo by Vittorio Iandolino, courtesy of Circolo del Design).

Going transmedia

With the material collected, we created a transmedia communication strategy: a story distributed across online and physical spaces, with different entry points for different audiences. Claudia's photos and the women's words, collected and edited by Clara, also became an exhibition in Turin.

The Circolo del Design exhibition introduced local citizens to the women of ALFa and what they think: women who live within the community but often remain unseen. They were both the subjects and the authors of the images.

Stories that numbers alone can't tell?

Qualitative data deserves design too. Do you need to visualize your data too? We're here.