Matteo Moretti | Data as a Medium
“Data is the new oil” has been one of the most influential metaphors of the digital age. It framed data as a resource to be extracted, refined, and transformed into value. In retrospect, the analogy appears even more accurate than intended: like oil, data have environmental costs, concentrate economic and political power, and contribute to shaping inequalities and geopolitical relations. But there is another assumption embedded in this metaphor: value is extracted from people through data, rather than created with and for them.
This talk explores what it might mean to reverse this relationship. Instead of understanding data primarily as a resource, it proposes approaching data as a medium: something through which people can understand complex phenomena, establish relationships with the realities described by data, participate in their interpretation, and develop new forms of individual and collective agency.
Drawing on a research practice developed across academic research, teaching, and professional work at Sheldon.studio, the talk presents three interconnected ways of working with data: designing with data, to explore, interpret, and communicate; designing for data, creating tools and situations through which data and perspectives can emerge; and designing through data, using data itself as a medium for participation, reflection, and engagement.
Across a selection of case studies, these approaches are examined through three recurring design actions — translate, relate, and enable — moving beyond simply making data visible or accessible towards creating the conditions for people to understand them, question them, relate them to their own lives, and act through them. Research, teaching, and professional practice are not presented as separate domains, but as an interconnected loop through which these ideas are continuously tested, challenged, and transformed.
At its centre lies a proposition that is both methodological and political: what if, instead of designing systems that extract value from people through data, we designed ways of creating value with and for people through data?
The Speaker
Matteo Moretti is a designer and associate professor at the University of Sassari, as well as co-founder of Sheldon.studio. His research focuses on data design applied to social issues, and he is an active member of the international Social Design Network. He has taught at Unibz, Elisava, Unifi, and Unirsm. Among the awards he has received are the Data Journalism Award (2015) and the European Design Award (2016, 2017, 2025). He has also served as a jury member for the World Press Photo Digital Storytelling Contest and, in 2018, was named one of the 100 ambassadors of Italian design in the world.
Program
14:00 | Welcome and introduction _ Maria Luce Lupetti
14:10 | Talk _ Matteo Moretti
14:40 | Q&A with audience
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