To the extent possible: the experience of a design summer workshop on images and things that worth measuring

One relevant aspect of the times we are living is the effort in supporting every claim, line of reasoning, every description or interpretation of reality with magnitudes, metrics, indexes … any abstract entity but measurable. The wealth of a nation, the academic productivity, the evolution toward a more sustainable development, the greatness of a poem … the unavoidable simplification implied in every quantification remain often undisclosed under the impartiality we show while presenting our data. This common way of arguing leads sometimes to paradoxes. Most of us rejoice when the GDP is growing (shouldn’t we ?) and someone find difficult to understand why a 2 degrees increase in the average temperature of the planet may represent a serious environmental threat (anyway, it’s just 2 degrees Celsius). This contribution is about a collaborative design workshop that, starting from these premises, took place at “Fundacion Cerezales Antonino y Cinia” (FCAYC) in August 2022. Aiming to explore the relation between language and mental images, an interdisciplinary and heterogeneous group of volunteer dedicated one week to envisioning alternative metrics and prototyping ways to communicate what they really would like to measure (or to try to) from a very specific perspective: the point of view of the few inhabitants of a rural underpopulated area close to León, in the north of Spain.