Information+ 2025 Presentations

Fifty years ago, Project Cybersyn—a unique Latin American experiment—combined technology and worker participation to support fairer, more horizontal, and situated responses. It advocated a radically bottom-up approach to managing the Chilean economy, ensuring that data was legible and accessible for collective decision-making.

Inspired by Cybersyn’s lessons and responding to increasingly...

This paper examines how social media platforms, particularly Twitter/X, function as infrastructures that design communication—structuring how text is produced, visualized, and read. Drawing on Mark Aakhus’s concept of communication as design and Cristina Rivera Garza’s idea of Twitter as a “laboratory of contemporary textuality,” I argue that interfaces shape not only content but also temporal...

What does it mean when data doesn’t just describe an institution—but challenges it? This presentation explores how data visualization can be a critical and artistic tool for exposing inequities in higher education. As a Faculty Senate Fellow at Texas State University, I visualized institutional and national datasets to highlight salary compression, inversion, and disparities disproportionately...

The Atlas of Popular Transport is a manifesto in collective intelligence—the convergence of human insight, technological tools, and imagination to create data against limitations. It shows that the knowledge to transform our cities already exists in the hands of those who move through them. The Atlas documents transport systems that move the majority of people in the world’s fastest-growing...

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion declaring the Israeli occupation of the West Bank unlawful. In collaboration with legal scholars, geoscientists, and human rights practitioners, SITU Research developed a machine learning model using remote sensing data to visualize systematic land dispossession in the West Bank. Harnessing four decades of Landsat...

"Emotional Geographies of the Mediterranean" explores the connection between space, emotions, and memory in coastal areas. Positioned to critically investigate the connections between geographies and human responses, it proposes a methodological and conceptual shift—from fixed spatial representations toward the dynamic and affective dimensions of place.

The emotional mapping is based on...

This presentation explores how data feminist principles can reshape data visualization practices in participatory urban planning. Building on critiques from Cultural Geography, Critical Cartography, and feminist GIS, it reflects on the Urban Belonging Project—a participatory GIS initiative involving 32 marginalized participants (including lgbt+, deaf, disabled, ethnic minorities,...

Textiles are a traditional site of feminist storytelling (Rosner, 2018). They bridge global feminist craft traditions from contemporary artist Faith Ringgold’s quilt series, Paj Ntaub story cloths, and Chilean Arpillera resistance quilts. Building on these traditions and layering them on top of site representation techniques, this research develops a methodological innovation of tufted...

“Lost in Transliteration” is a multi-part project that explores how Chinese names are transformed and often misread by Western-centric systems of transliteration—processes that often flatten cultural nuance and lead to misclassification or erasure.
The project includes two interactive tools: [Not My Name][1], which reveals transliteration ambiguities, and the upcoming Not My Gender, which...

Distance Unknown brings policy data into the public realm, transforming unread reports on migration issues into accessible, multisensory visualizations that catalyze real-world conversations that had the effect of changing US policy. Based on over 7,000 household migrant surveys collected by the World Food Programme across Central America and the Darien Gap, the project visualizes three...

How can we make data more accessible in a region where nearly half of the population lacks internet access and many people still live without electricity? In Latin America, information gaps are not bridged simply by publishing databases on websites or technical reports.

This talk is about the exploration we have done the past 3 years on participatory data interventions to bring data...

Migration through the Americas is a humanitarian crisis shaped by geopolitical pressures and infrastructural deficiencies. This presentation introduces a participatory design initiative that uses data visualization and machine learning to analyze spatial preferences of migrants in northern Mexico. In collaboration with Casa Monarca in Monterrey, migrants designed ideal support spaces using...

Both practitioners and researchers of visualization often hold stereotypical assumptions about the role of data and visualization in effecting change in the world: revealing a state of affairs, providing evidence of harm, providing insights for better policy. But as critics have pointed out, evidence of harm can also stigmatize without achieving change, leading to worse outcomes. As policy...

As part of my research on the history of information design, I have been focusing on the study of visualization systems in entire books rather than individual visualizations. I would like to propose a new category for information design study: books that describe the world through the eyes.

Their common attributes are:
The response to a cultural need to visualize the entire world
The...

This presentation explores how sound-based art practices offer alternative ways of engaging with information—beyond legibility and the visual. Information is felt as much as its understood. In contrast to dominant frameworks of data representation and visualization, which often prioritize static, visual clarity, sound carries knowledge within a spatiotemporal realm— sound shapes perception...

Data is an environmental justice issue. This presentation will feature recent work to visualize environmental (in)justice in New York City to shape municipal policy priorities.

How can compelling visualization be used to steer municipal environmental policy and resources towards creative and effective solutions? How might data visualization approaches engage with the ways that data...

How do you visualize data on the active dissolution of your own rights? How do you do so in a way that actually brings joy, catharsis, and a refresh of your own creative practice? You need good partners, a firm grasp of "just the facts, ma'am," a strong metaphor, and a clear narrative. To visualize the impacts of restricting abortion rights on women, children, families, and communities in the...

In recent years, an abundance of projects meant to support data advocacy have revealed new challenges for information designers. This research focuses on understanding the “epistemic barriers” that can arise within data advocacy projects, such as self-censorship, disengagement, and feelings of diminished agency among participants. We introduce an analytical framework that designers can use to...

As threats to democratic institutions grow, clear and accessible data storytelling is vital. This session draws on Memaro Studio’s work with leading civic organizations dedicated to digital voter engagement, mobilizing underrepresented communities around reproductive rights, and increasing transparency in political funding—focused on telling compelling impact stories to build public trust and...

Visual journalism combines traditional information design with multimedia, UX design, and other technologies to tell complex stories. As relationships between countries grow more tense, infographics and data visualizations displaying geopolitical dynamics become increasingly challenging to design and explain. How can we clearly represent conflicts through data, while preserving the...

In an age of polarization and information fatigue, visual journalism has the power to cut through, especially when it’s rooted in place. This presentation shares how our small teams at the Minnesota Star Tribune collaborate across reporting, design, and development to create award-winning visuals that make complex information personal and impactful for local readers. Through projects exploring...

What happens before the first chart or encoding? In data visualization practice, some of the most important design work is also the least visible: figuring out what the real problem is. This talk draws on a multi-phase study with professional visualization practitioners to explore how they frame problems before anything is visualized. Rather than simply responding to briefs or requests,...

Even in typical "good" charts it's often easy to miss, or misinterpret, what's going on in the data. Moreover, "best practices" like continuous color scales, equally spaced grid lines, and aggregating data to the week or month leave critical leaps from numbers to meaning up to visual perception or unexamined assumptions.

I'll share 4 specific well-defined "before/after" replacements. For...

This presentation shares the work of Coastliner Lab, a transdisciplinary mapping initiative that engages with disrupted ecologies and contested waters in planetary critical zones. It asks: how can data entangle with watery bodies—interweaving cartographic, scientific, and communal knowledge related to deep sea and hydraulic energies—to shape participatory and activist mapmaking practices?...

Fragile Frontlines is a critical investigation of the Hindu Kush Himalayas, a vital ecosystem supporting over two billion people. The region faces unprecedented climatic challenges from melting glaciers to shifting weather patterns, escalating risks for frontline communities. 

The Atlas serves as a climate advocacy tool for a cryosphere in crisis, documenting cascading climate catastrophes...

Human and more-than-human experiences with digital biodiversity data are deeply intertwined with taste, poetics, cultural relations, meaning-making, physical encounters, loss, and other aesthetic dimensions. However, rapidly evolving digital biodiversity data platforms prioritize technoscientific advancements, futuristic visual design, and quantitative output over integrating other crucial...

Scientific data has tremendous potential to engage the public in environmental issues, but for communication to be successful, the datasets must be presented in ways that are accessible to a wide variety of non-expert public users. Visual presentations of data aid audiences in identifying trends and making inferences but can require significant graph literacy skills to interpret correctly and...

As we increasingly rely on visualization to communicate about data, lack of equitable information access for blind and low vision (BLV) people can exclude people from important conversations. But what does it mean to successfully make a visualization accessible? In this talk, I reflect on lessons learned from 5 years of accessible visualization research. The idea of decentering the visual...

Asking students to “solve a problem” is an effective method for exploring content. This approach, known as problem-based learning (PBL), promotes active learning, critical thinking, and the application of knowledge to real-world scenarios. It aids in developing essential skills such as research, collaboration, and problem-solving. During the panel discussion “Towards a Public Pathway for...

Microbes are foundational to nearly every ecosystem on Earth, including our bodies—yet they remain largely invisible and underappreciated in technological design. The human microbiome plays a crucial role in health and well-being, while environmental microbiomes influence a range of factors, including soil fertility and indoor air quality. This presentation will explore how we engage with this...

Charts and graphs help people analyze data—but can they also be useful to AI systems? To investigate this question, we perform a series of experiments with two commercial vision-language models: GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5. Across three representative analysis tasks, the two systems describe synthetic data sets more precisely and accurately when raw data is accompanied by a scatterplot, especially...

At 28, I began teaching Information Design in the Master in Eco-Social Design at Bozen-Bolzano, Italy — my first academic role after years as a freelance designer. With no prior experience in teaching, I entered the classroom full of questions: How can data visualization support ecological and social change? How should we teach it meaningfully?

This talk is not just about what I taught, but...

Humanistic datasets increasingly include new levels of nuance and complexity, capturing something of the multi-faceted and systemic nature of human experience. These datascapes enable new kinds of exploratory investigation and suggest the sharable record of use, which traverse diverse semantic contexts (spatial, temporal, conceptual) at zoomable scale. With such data often modelled as complex...

An introduction to the critical cartographic approaches of Radical Atlas of Ferguson USA (Belt, 2024) a book that spatializes political systems of structural inequality, told through the lens of Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is where a Black teenager named Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in 2014—and where the movement for Black Lives radiated in the weeks after. In over...

This presentation examines the rise of necro-nominalism: the practice of systematically inscribing the names of the dead. This expanded the franchise of memory, building on advances in bureaucracy, record-keeping, and design to create comprehensive registers that ground memorials.

Naming the dead has military antecedents; Menin Gate, in Belgium, one of the best known WWI memorials,...

Under contested urban redevelopment processes, counter-data practices challenge state narratives of decline and deterioration that justify the displacement of marginalized communities and the erasure of the urban fabric the have fostered. This study examines counter-data practices by community organizations, activists, researchers, and artists in the Sewoon District in Seoul, South Korea. The...