Visualising sustainability communication with Sankey diagrams - a viable approach?

Communicating the idea of Sustainable Development is being hindered through the complexity and variety of the contents it includes. The difficulty of presenting such contents, which are often combined with huge amounts of complex data, to people which are often not familiar with it brings up the necessity to use visualisations that are directly addressed to the visual absorption of humans. The objective of this paper is to discuss whether Sankey Diagrams as a form of visualisation, can be used to support Sustainability Communication. The toolbox for this analysis is based on semiotics in symbol theory. This paper identifies three semiotic key-factors and discusses two of them in order to judge sankey diagrams as a viable approach for sustainability communication. Furthermore basic directions in designing sankey diagrams are shown concerning the semiotic approach. By using semiotic tools sankey diagrams can be designed to further elements of the concept of sustainable development, especially understanding complexity, developing key competencies and realising potentials. Nonetheless the integration of the complexity of this concept in all its dimension is hard to impart concerning the compatibility of quantitative and qualitative content.