My last post about the Visualized conference. I hope you have enjoyed reading these posts over the last week. For me, Visualized was a refreshing change of pace from my usual economics conference experience where presenters typically fail to consider the needs of their audience. It was a fantastic opportunity to see and speak with some of the top people in the field of data visualization, storytelling, and creative design.

Here are a few topics I’d like to see, either at next year’s Visualized (there will be one, right?) or at other similar conferences:

  • Specific process talks. There were a lot of general process talks—how someone went from concept to final visualization or installation—but it would be great to see more specifics on a single project: drafts, sketches, dead-ends, and client reactions.
  • Post-process talks. I’d love to see someone talk about what they did differently or would have done differently after releasing a project. I think this is also an area ripe for experimentation (and part of the reason why I launched HelpMeViz). Can visualizers take public comments into account to fix, address, or modify elements of a project? How would they do so? Why would they do so?
  • Data visualization experiments. Perhaps I’m asking too much of this and should just be satisfied that there’s something like the Vis conference, but I’d like to see more of the experimentation side of the field. Experimentation need not be confined to academics—the producers of visualizations that spoke at Visualized can, and probably do, test their work with audiences and clients, and learning how those tests inform process and design would be interesting.
February 23, 2014
1 Comment
4192