Communicate to alert; know to avoid

Catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, landslides, avalanches and floods that have happened in recent periods bring our attention towards finding an efficient system to communicate the risks and behaviors needed to bring the negative consequences to a minimum. We are not able to prevent an earthquake, a flood or an avalanche, but we have to learn to control the effects of them by reducing the size of the consequences. Under these considerations, the Department of Architecture and Design of the University of Genova and the Public Safety of Genova have been developing a project for a better communication and awareness with the goal of identifying an efficient network of communication which would be able to educate the citizens about the correct behaviours in case of a calamitous event. The purpose of this Communication is to indentify the most efficient media and messages for the design, to convey to the viewers in order to reduce the damages to the heritage and to the people. After the first year of experimentation, the collaboration became even more active and started to gain important results, by defining very clearly the type of communication and relatable language to make it so that each kind of viewer will be able to know the risk and avoid the danger.