Composition Practices At The Intersection Of Design And Social Research: Technical Gestures, Synthesis Methods And Imagination Apparatuses

In contemporary visual culture, composition has become a pervasive mechanism for producing images: stitched satellite views, automated photo-video collages, image grids from search engines, or comparisons of viral memes (Bonhomme, Joschke & Truxa, 2023). This article approaches composition not merely as a technique, but as an epistemic strategy at the crossroads of design and the social sciences (Ricci, 2019; Venturini et al., 2015)—particularly within digital sociology (Marres, 2017), experimental anthropology, and participatory ethnography (Estalella & Criado, 2018). It places special emphasis on performativity and methodological experimentation (Lury & Wakeford, 2014; Marres et al., 2018). In a landscape shaped by the proliferation of image-centered platforms (Faulkner et al., 2018), visual compositions become tools to trace, map, and articulate social phenomena—beyond traditional academic formats (Niederer & Colombo, 2019; Ricci, 2019). Rather than offering a fixed definition, the article explores the plasticity of composition through three case studies that highlight different research strategies: (1) technical gestures that expand the visual sensorium, as in the DEPT. project, which enriches Google Street View with annotated composites; (2) synthesis methods for representing image corpora, such as Naturpradi, which aggregates pictorial content around urban nature debates in Paris; and (3) speculative devices that foster collaborative imagination, exemplified by the COVID-19 Testing project and its manual collages of social media images. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this typology offers a practical framework for designers, digital media researchers, and artists seeking to integrate visual composition into their investigative practices.