Our lives are dominated by digital technologies, it influences how we socialise, we work, we play, we shop, we explore the world around us and access knowledge and services. We live in both the digital and the physical world, but the digital world has the power to change what we experience every second, this has resulted in constant enhancement. Spontaneity and reactivity assume an increasingly prominent role in this communication universe. This inevitably influences social, economic, and political dynamics.

Faced with a highly mediated and mediatised world, communication has attained significant power. A dispersed power, shared between different protagonists. A power that is not always identifiable and which often tends to be more associated with rumour and crisis than with information and clarification. This power of communication, more and more horizontal, challenges established power bases.

Technological change in the digital world is occurring at a pace that neither society or legislators are able to keep up with. Since the call for this volume of Comunicação e Sociedade journal we have seen the launch of CHATgpt and BARD. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, internet of things (IoT) and robotics are sweeping all areas of society in the developed world, enhancing our transport systems, our healthcare, industry and much more. It is still not clear how it will affect our jobs, our security, and our life. There is so much to understand and communicate.

Where does the role of design fit into this system of communication? The discipline of design is extremely diverse, design competencies include planning and strategy, visualising, and prototyping, creating the material and the digital world. But designers work materially and immaterially. Design, in its most varied perspectives and disciplines, can be an important contribution to the construction of more informed, enlightened and, consequently, fairer societies. Designers can influence behaviour, they can influence policy making, organisation strategy, and through content creation, curation, structure, visualisation create better or indeed worse digital worlds. Designers can deconstruct and decode imagery and photographic content and can animate representations and produce all kinds of narratives of high cosmetic-manipulative content, as can new AI systems such as DALL-E or other AI image generators. The use of design on the other hand can support the development of models, prototypes or the most varied type of solutions that seek to contribute to an active citizenship and respond to the challenges and dilemmas of digital and contemporary societies.

In fact, design is much more than a tool with mere aesthetic functions, it has a central role in an increasingly complex and challenging world to navigate safely, securely and reliably. Design has an important role in the organisation of information, in the construction of narratives and, consequently, in the suggestion of meanings. Therefore, designers and design researchers have serious moral and philosophical challenges. This digital landscape offers so much to so many, such as services for health, mobility, housing, education and to climate challenges, yet we face many unknowns regarding the harm that can be done by these technologies. Designers because of their central role must be cognisant of the digital challenges.

The PETRAS National Centre of Excellence (https://petras-iot.org) is a research programme in the United Kingdom created to ensure that technological advances in the IoT are developed and applied in consumer and business contexts, safely and securely. This is done by considering social and technical issues relating to the cybersecurity of IoT devices, and related systems and networks. Design is one of the core disciplines where the PETRAS framework is applied. This framework ensures that when developing and implementing digital solutions they are developed through a PETRAS lens. This means addressing:

There has always been a claim that design has ability to engage real people and communities, understand everyday problems and implement the “right” solutions, not just the “newest technology” and that this enables us to bridge between other disciples, and to bridge the gap between the rapid advancement in science, technology and engineering, and real people, challenges and contexts on an everyday level (^{Tsekleves et al., 2021}). This may well be the case but it does also mean we must be able to work as a team with other disciplines, other communities and organisations and in the face of the moral challenges do it responsibly.

There has always been a discourse around responsible design (^{Tatum, 2004}), but now more than ever it is critical to understand how design can be a power for good, can be responsible and can cocreate a flourishing world with and for everyone. This volume illustrates the diversity of how design and design research, both analogue and digital, contributes to this endeavour many ways, on a broad and systemic level but also on a narrow level, focusing on concrete solutions to local and specific problems.

Over the last decade, in the north of Portugal, especially in the region of Porto, a set of research projects were developed, in the area of communication design (or with its participation), which were dedicated to social change, studying and acting in various contexts of social fragility. It is important to highlight some of these research cases, which serve as reference for this volume, in order to understand what has been done on the ground, locally:

The experiences observed in these projects reinforce the arguments of a number of authors, namely: the need for designers to get involved and work with communities and local actors (^{Margolin & Margolin, 2002}; ^{Nold et al., 2022}); the constraints associated with the complexity of social projects, advocating that action should be taken at the level of small communities or informal organisations (^{Chen et al., 2015}); and the warning about the danger of the utopian dimension of the ambitions that usually move this type of projects, recommending a methodology that enables the contributions to be measurable (^{Koskinen & Hush, 2016}; Nold et al., 2022).

The recognition and study of the legacy left by these projects, accessed through documentation, such as scientific publications, reports or academic theses, or through contact with the people responsible for each project, informed and consolidated the foundations of the project ECHO - Echoing the Communal Self: Designing the Dissemination and Replication of Self-initiated Practices in Underprivileged Urban Communities in a Postpandemic World, which presents its unique characteristics, namely for acting in the specific context of the Balteiro social neighbourhood. This project, presented in this thematic volume, in the article “The Importance of Communication Design in the Process of Disseminating Community Practices in Social Neighbourhoods: The Balteiro”, by Nuno Martins, Leonor Guimarães, Daniel Brandão, Eliana Penedos-Santiago and Emílio Brandão, demonstrates how research in communication design can contribute to the dissemination of community practices in economically disadvantaged contexts such as social housing estates. In their study design’s action involved the design of a system for documenting and sharing community practices, which may inspire other citizens to an informed and responsible action. The results are two documentaries about two case studies of self-initiated community practices - Associação Recreativa Clube Balteiro Jovem and Escola Oficina - and the development of an online platform that took into account the level of schooling and literacy of the communities of social neighbourhoods in the city of Vila Nova de Gaia.

The potential of design as a mediator between multiple disciplines and between communities and entities responsible for the digitalization of culture is also studied by Ana Velhinho and Pedro Almeida, in the article “The Legacy of Collective Memory in Digital Culture: Digitalisation, Cultural Mapping and Co-Creation”. For these authors, design has been focusing less on the materialization of objects as an end, favouring instead the implementation of co-creation methodologies and the activation of systems that allow people to use technologies to take an active role in documenting and safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. These processes of digital co-creation of collective memories thus present themselves as participatory alternatives to the usually unidirectional processes carried out by museums, libraries and archives.

Collaboration through digital tools has also been explored in cartography, namely in the mapping of diverse economies, which emerge through the hands of non-governmental organisations, as alternative proposals to the prevailing capitalist economy. Through the analysis of five case studies in Portugal and one in Catalonia, in their article “Mapping Maps of Alternatives: Diverse Economies and Modes of Mapping in Common”, Sara Moreira and Anselmo Canha seek to understand collaborative digital maps as tools of communication of other possible worlds. After an introductory discussion about the democratic qualities of the digital commons, through a methodology that crosses online ethnography with interviews with the people in charge of each analysed project, the authors extracted detailed information about the structures and taxonomies of each case study, which they present in the form of diagrams. The results of the entire investigation are subsequently measured according to the dimensions of governance, economy, technology, knowledge and impact of the collaborative mapping projects analysed.

The role of information design in difficult situations, such as crisis contexts, is analysed by Jacqueline Isaac Machado Brigagão, Claudia Malinverni and Mariana De Gea Gervasio, taking into account the recent pandemic of the disease COVID-19, caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus, in the article “Design in Health Data Communication: Infographics About COVID-19 in Rio Claro Municipality”. In their study, these authors developed a qualitative analysis of 133 newsletters that regularly presented figures on the evolution of the disease in the municipality of Rio Claro, Brazil. Focusing on basic aspects of communication design such as format, colours and content, this study identified an iterative design procedure aimed at refining the communication of information as the pandemic situation evolved.

Indeed, the pandemic of COVID-19 imposed changes in communication in different sectors, and especially in educational organizations. In the article “Challenges and Strategies of Digital Communication in an Educational Organization in Portugal, in the COVID-19 Pandemic Period”, Inês Miguel and Márcia Silva describe parental perceptions of the digital transformation process of the internal communication of an educational organization in Portugal, during three different periods of the year 2020, the year in which the pandemic was declared: the period before the mandatory confinement, the confinement period and the period of return to school. The authors found that informality, transparency, and empathy were important values in the use of digital communication tools and channels by parents of students and teachers, contributing decisively to reducing and preventing alarmism in message transmission and improving communication effectiveness in this context of crisis.

In the last article of this thematic volume, Íris Susana Pires Pereira, Maitê Gil and Cristina Maria Sylla focus on education and the challenges posed by the design of digital texts. In the article “Meeting the Challenges of Designing Multimodal Texts to Promote Multiliteracies Pedagogy”, the authors present the study of the interactive story app Mobeybou in Brazil, which was developed to help pre-school and primary school children to learn the construction of intercultural and multimodal meanings, empowering them with skills for full participation in digital communication contexts. This research highlights high complexity in the design of multimodal texts for digital media, pointing to the urgency of greater collaboration between research in education, semiotics and design.

In all six papers presented in the thematic section of this volume of Comunicação e Sociedade journal, research into, through and for communication design (^{Frayling, 1993}) crosses both digital and material worlds, seeking to study or bridge the two and to understand how design and communication can improve our lives and prepare society for the opportunities as well as the global challenges of tomorrow (^{Tsekleves et al., 2021}).