DIGITAL EVIDENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE ACCESSIBILITY Service Design to counter the invisibility of communities marginalised by armed conflicts

Marginalised communities such as refugees, internally displaced persons and peoples victims of armed conflicts are often excluded from access to traditional communication and information circuits (UNHCR, 2021). In emergency situations, the destruction and damage of telecommunication infrastructures, frequent blackouts and congestion of telephone networks, together with suppressions operated by regimes on free information, deny populations the possibility of transmitting and receiving vital information, hindering limited humanitarian operations. The forms of social, political and economic exclusion of which these “invisible communities” are victims entail serious deprivation of the tools and opportunities necessary to stay in contact immediately and subsequently to document, witness and disseminate their own history and cultural identity to others. The concept of digital divide is seen as a serious exclusion factor, and this also includes reduced or denied access to technologies and the consequent limitation to sharing vital stories and information, priorities as much as access to primary goods (United Nations, 2024). The objective of the proposed research idea is inserted within the debate about the plural power of Inclusive Design and its ability to outline design intervention strategies for the empowerment of invisible communities that experience digital limitations generated by war conflicts. Specifically, it intends to promote, through service design, an organic action that counters invisibility and distortion of narratives and that favors inclusion and equitable access to information and digital resources. In this way, through a choral dialogue, marginalised communities would also have the possibility to witness their condition in an accessible, safe and co-created way (Lambert, 2018). The adopted methodology provides for the identification and documentation of case studies that have already contributed to improving access to information. Barriers that prevent populations from accessing free communication, preserving their cultural identity and documenting their history will be identified and analysed (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Through the human-centered approach, it intends to develop a service design framework, with a focus on communication, that provides for the active involvement of communities and stakeholders engaged in the fight for freedom of expression, in order to design scalable and replicable solutions also in other emergency scenarios. Expected results include accessible, sustainable digital information and narration tools adaptable to different cultural contexts (Sin et al., 2021), that allow communities to have safe and uncensored communication channels, to maintain control over their own stories and to share them in an inclusive and respectful way.