Robert Semper, Chief Science Officer and Senior Director of Educator Engagement and Jennifer Frazier, Senior Scientist at the Exploratorium, describe the importance of visualizing data for the public and outline goals for the conference: bring together experts and practitioners to share experiments, promote dialogue, identify successes and failures, and surface future research and development to guide work in the field. 

Stamen Design founder Eric Rodenbeck discusses the intellectual power of data visualizations especially when data is fuzzy and open to human imagination and interpretation. But he strikes a cautionary note about the vast amount of data available in the cloud that consumes staggering amounts of energy and can leave us “lost in a sea of information.” 

University of Utah biochemist Janet Iwasa discusses the importance of visualization in forming scientific hypotheses. She shares her work visualizing protein function, a major driver of cellular processes. Because proteins are so small, their behavior isn’t directly observable and scientists must pull together many types of data in visualizations to understand their function. Translating their hypotheses into 3-D animations allow biochemists to communicate, critique and refine the research. 

Exploratorium learning researcher Joyce Ma discusses lessons learned from the Living Liquid project,which allows visitors to explore ocean datasets with an interactive touch table. She covers lessons learned during the multi-year NSF-funded project about the importance of building multidisciplinary teams, thoughtful curation of datasets, providing visitors with immediate access to data, and facilitating interactive exploration of data visualizations.

New York Timesreporter and graphics editor Nadja Popovich discusses the ways that visualizations of global climate change can be personalized either through localizing data around a reader’s home town or by creating visualizations that use human time scales and measurements. By inviting the audience to engage and customize climate data through online media, the visualization designers can humanize the data and create a deeper understanding of how global phenomena will impact readers personally.

University of British Columbia computer scientist Tamara Munzer describes how research into the individual elements of data visualizations can help guide design choices for creating more intuitive visualizations and avoiding unnecessary confusion. 

Northwestern University cognitive psychologist Steve Franconeri describes how the “curse of knowledge” can lead to data visualizations that are easily interpreted by experts but ambiguous or confusing to new users. To avoid this pitfall, Franconeri points to the way data journalists use text annotations and highlights, such as arrows and circles. 

Indiana University PhD candidate Andreas Bueckle describes research on public data literacy in museums, and how user-driven visualization design can help public audiences better understand what might otherwise be abstract concepts or unfamiliar visualization types. 

Columbia University professor Barbara Tversky describes how visual representations can be empowered through narrative, providing them with agency, emotion, and suspense. Research shows that some visual elements have particular meaning compared with others: for instance, boxes and bar charts are interpreted as discrete comparisons while lines indicate a trend. Likewise, arrows between elements indicate a causal interpretation or sequences in a process. 

Professor of Computer Graphics Technology Vetria Byrd discusses efforts to broaden the field of data visualization, beginning with a diversity workshop she organized at Clemson University. This work led to the creation of a new undergraduate major at Purdue Polytechnic Institute where she currently teaches. Drawing on many fields from engineering to the arts, she encourages and trains students to tell stories with data visualization, rather than just to consume or generate data.

Co-director of Google’s Big Picture team Fernanda Viégas describes how real-time data visualizations can allow users to engage with data in more intuitive and relatable ways. She presented two examples from her team: “Digital Attack Map,” which shows the origin and target countries of hackers attempting to cripple computer servers all over the world and “Wind Map,” a real-time forecast of winds displayed as dynamic stream lines that users can zoom into and explore. 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Senior Program Manager Carrie McDougall discusses Science On a Sphere (SOS), a visualization technology developed at NOAA that projects dynamic and massive datasets on a large spherical display. Installed in 150 different locations, primarily museums and other informal science institutions, SOS provides public audience access to spherically rendered depictions of ocean, weather, and climate data. 

Bryan Kennedy, Director of Museum Technology and Digital Operations at the Science Museum of Minnesota, describes xMacroscope, a collaboration between several museums and computer science teams. He described the constraints for data visualization comprehension in museum settings and how the project is both designing and developing technology platforms and exhibits and conducting learning research to understand and improve how the public understands and engages with data visualization. 

University of Arizona environmental scientist Mónica Ramirez-Andreotta talks about the importance of involving the public in co-creating data visualizations. She presents two projects that used data collected by citizen scientists and, through workshops and customized data visualizations, helped them assess health risks from environmental contaminants. The citizen science projects focused on community gardens and rainwater collection sites and presented the data in different visualizations types to evaluate which were most effective at conveying information and helping participants make individualized assessments and decisions about their own exposure levels.

Heather Segale, Education and Outreach Director for the Lake Tahoe Environmental Research Center, describes how the UC Davis facility connects visitors to place through interactive data exhibits and visualizations. The AR Sandbox exhibit uses projections on white sand that encourages visitors to explore the topography and hydrology of Lake Tahoe. A touch screen exhibit provides real-time and historical data of the lake and surrounding region and visitors can also contribute their own data and observations through a citizen science app. 

Ryan Wyatt, Director of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, discusses the unique exhibition space of domes, which are large immersive theaters that allow people to go on narrative journeys of time and space. Dome shows are most effective when they start at human scales and put people at the center of the action. He cautioned that data visualizations should be as simple as possible to avoid cognitive overload, for instance by displaying ocean currents using monochromatic color schemes and avoiding additional datasets such as salinity or temperature. 

Exploratorium Senior Artist Susan Schwartzenberg describes the Fisher Bay Observatory, a gallery focused on environmental science and the history of San Francisco Bay. The Observatory is a glass building sitting on the edge of the Bay with the city on one side and water on the other and features tools that help people explore the local landscape. Exhibits and displays include a map collection, real-time and past environmental data exhibits, and a carved topographic table on which datasets, such as sea-level rise, earthquake faultlines, and fog patterns, are projected.