Through the creation of design projects and a written thesis, the research questions the role and power of data visualisation in the approach to economic issues. In this critical and theoretical study, I first wonder how data visualisations that construct access to economic information and issues, shape specific representations and behaviours. I hypothesise that the 'intellectual technologies' (Goody) that make these data visible – charts, diagrams, networks, maps – have built a particularly narrow, disembodied and depoliticising view of the economy since the early nineteenth century. However, under certain conditions, design has the means to encourage the reappropriation of economic subjects by non-experts. I try to understand, by studying the evolution of its methods, the nature of the contemporary regime of visualisation of economic phenomena, which I describe as neoliberal. I then explore the design spaces where alternatives can be deployed.
Secondly, beyond describing, understanding or making economic phenomena understood, it seemed to me that the role of design in data visualisation was to allow to grasp: to grasp data and phenomena, on a cognitive level, in order to understand them; but also to grasp economic phenomena, in their meaning, their significance and their raison d'être, the meaning of the economy and the objectives it pursues; finally, to grasp through the senses, on a sensory and sensitive level, reminding us that beyond the eye and the sight, it is the whole body that can carry out the grasping. As I was unable to grasp the economy by focusing on the cognitive or communicative performance of data visualisations, the hypothesis of a 'sorcerer's capture' (Stengers and Pignarre), became a fertile field of experimentation and as a precious key to understanding. It has allowed to position, in my work, imagination, bodies, senses and mental representations as essential elements for thinking about the economy. Firstly, with the magic that inhabits our relationship to the economy, I focus on the power of data visualisations to make the invisible visible, and then I question their power linked to their nature as images. Then, with the magical bondings (Bruno), I sketch a theory of visualisation as a power to bind and introduce the method of microcosmograms. Finally, with witchcraft, it is the capacity to touch the impalpable that is examined and confronted with the concept of unbewitching (Favret-Saada), from which I extract methodological principles and a questioning of the figure of the designer-unbewitcher.