New York's Museum of Modern Art has exhibited Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, curated by Paola Antonelli, which features information design from classic infographics to a project with missing memories created using AI.

On display in a windowed gallery on the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) ground floor, the exhibition has pieces from The Synthetic Memories Archive by Spanish research and design studio Domestic Data Streamers.

Hung on the wall, the Domestic Data Streamer's 2D works feature images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) using prompt texts from real people. These were based on reconstructed personal memories and are shown underneath the pictures.

The project aims to create an archive of these memories, but Domestic Data Streamers also takes a therapeutic approach, using the technology for people with trauma or dementia.

The work is part of Antonelli's expanded definition of information design, drawing from MoMA's archive. Many of the pieces were featured in her 2008 exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind.

"[Information design] is not always about data sets acquired from a scientific or a statistical entity," Antonelli told Dezeen.

Works of statistics are also present in the exhibition – as in Laura Kurgan and Dan Miller's Two Sides of the Same Coin model that shows the geographic distribution of "human-associated microbes" on one side and more than 12,000 years of global land use on the other to depict biodiversity loss.

Antonelli said she wanted to show the investigative fact of information design in a time of heightened distrust of institutions.

She said she was especially interested in designers who make their own data sets, representing a "complete design".

"In this particular moment where our trust is vacillating every day, I wanted to show how you're right not to trust anybody, but at least you can follow a designer's, a journalist's, a politician's path – to see whether you agree with the end product or not," Antonelli said.

This investigative approach was seen clearly in London-based Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography's film The Seizure of the Iuventa.

It depicts the team's efforts to use recreations and models, such as remote sensing, to aid an NGO rescue boat accused by the Italian government of smuggling.

While information design usually breaks down aspects of information into impactful and understandable clips, some of the objects depict scale and complexity in a more literal way.

Antonelli installed Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Calculating Empires in a side room of the space. Covering three walls, the work features icons and text tracing institutions and theories across the full scope of human culture and communication since 1500.

William Villalongo and Shraddha Raman's graphic work extends the data collected by WEB Du Bois on the African diaspora and the employment of African Americans into the 21st century.

Digital representations of New York Times interactive articles about the fire at Notre Dame and the Tulsa Race Massacre show the use of information design in digital media.

Most of the projects were digitally made. Exceptions include the ink-and-pencil Dear Data series by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, a series of postcards between the two data designers depicting elements of their everyday lives.

Antonelli aimed to show an array of takes on information design and said that the medium matters less than the information.

"The medium itself doesn't really matter," she said. "People can narrate data."

"It's about recognising the effort to explain complex information in a truly understandable way."

Antonelli has previously talked to Dezeen about how designers can help slow the decline of humanity due to climate change. In 2023, Pulitzer Prize winner Mona Chalabi spoke to us about how "data replicates the existing systems of power".

Images are courtesy of MoMA. 

Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design is on at MoMA from 27 September to 13 June 2027. Find more exhibitions, festivals and talks in architecture and design at Dezeen Events Guide.