SDGs Like You Have Never Seen Before!: Co-designing Data Visualization Tools with and for University Students

Sustainability is currently a hot topic also inside universities. Every year, several universities publish an open report based on their efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the university community is often unaware of these reports and does not know how an individual can contribute to sustainability inside and outside the university premises. To partly tackle that, we exploited a three-step process composed of interviews, data analysis, and co-design to understand which data are relevant in this context and what elements an interactive data visualization system should have to raise awareness of the actions performed by the university, and of what can be done by the university community to improve the overall sustainability of the campuses. In this paper, we present our experience in co-designing solutions with students of the University of Bologna. We finally extract some guidelines that can be exploited in a similar context to make university sustainability reporting an action toward a more sustainable future.