Information Visualization and Design Activism: An Emerging Relationship

Information Visualization is a practice of visual communication that aims to make visible and understandable phenomena whose invisibility, abstraction or complexity defy human perception and knowledge. It involves a visual codification of categories and quantities, relationships and processes, embodied in artefacts such as charts, thematic maps, infographics or interactive data visualizations. This kind of devices are designed in order to enable insights and new interpretations about different subject matters, taking advantage of human perceptual and cognitive faculties. In recent years, Information Visualization has become widespread in several fields of activity, from science to the arts, through journalism and has gained significant media coverage. This growth in the use of visualizations makes it necessary to have critical tools which may allow a better understanding of these visual devices – What do they communicate? Why? For what purpose? This paper presents a set of arguments which relates Information Visualization with Design Activism, a multidisciplinary approach to design that is identified by the ethical motivation of the designer, by the sense of public intervention that underlies it and its counter-narrative or disruptive discourse. Based on the literature review, we arrive at the assumption that it may be possible to characterize an emerging sub-domain that results from the intersection between Information Visualization and Activist Design. The validation of this assumption implies the development of this research in order to identify and characterize visualization projects in which the Motivation, Purpose and Discourse factors can be compatible with those that identify Design Activism.