Maria Marinescu-Duca (she/ her)
My practice revolves around social design with a focus on graphics and a passion for storytelling. I specialize in designing engaging everyday experiences for people, thinking about the bigger picture as well as considering the details. Primarily through digital work, I design for social change.
Communicating Cancer
Collective Intelligence is the new DNA of our society, based on sharing, human contact, openness, and empathy. People have a new approach in dealing with death and cancer, using new systems of immersion and expression to communicate through their emotions. We have chosen to represent this world in an abstract way to convey identities of communication that evolve beyond words and speech.
Our speculative future consists of a sensory-rich emotion database sourced and framed or demonstrated through created artefacts for the context. Its fundamental purpose is communicating cancer through empathetic experiences of family in all its senses. We portrayed three distinct scenarios and their respective implications; a family of strangers dealing with the same condition, a family of blood trying to understand one another and a family of love dealing with the grief that comes with one’s loss.
Project Links
Digital Behaviours
Digital pollution is responsible for ≈ 4% of global CO₂ emissions, more than the entire civil aviation sector, almost as much as Russia and 4 times bigger than that of the UK. Due to the complex nature of the digital environment and newness of this threat, most people are still unaware even of its existence.
Digital Behaviours is a platform that responds to this environmental problem, encouraging digital frugality. The scope of the project is to reduce the digital carbon footprint and create awareness of the problem. It combats the data we are littered with, creating an exciting and mindful new narrative to the digital experience. Its direct impact is to let people know where they stand more precisely and how they can do better.
The services provided through the Digital Behaviours platform constitute in direct to action methods. They provide a clear guide on how to be respectful of the planet and of your electronic devices. The platform presents three direct to action ways in which you can get involved and become more digitally environmental. The service’s goal is to continuously educate people to the point where they are not as reliant on the service itself.
Living Language
Living Language is a speculative design project whose scope is to afford better communication between medical professionals and those affected by cancer in treatment pathways, clinical research settings and personal life.
It is a democratic platform aimed for the year 2030 where users can create and vote on visual symbols that describe cancer symptoms. Voting is done in an electoral system as each global region holds a percentage of influence based on users and population, preserving a universal perspective.
Selected symbols are catered towards wide audiences, regardless of knowledge level or spoken language. Living Language creates an intuitive method to describe the condition, available to most. Being an international dialect, it can be used across all fields of medical practice- capturing data in its purest state, without the need for translation. Developed with the help of medical industry experts, the project represents a vignette into how cancer care might develop within the next decade.
