Designing a Visualization Atlas: Lessons & Reflections from The UK Co-Benefits Atlas for Climate Mitigation

2026-04-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of communicating climate mitigation data—characterized by diverse audiences, complex datasets, and variable contexts—through a ten-month co-design process involving eight workshops, fifteen rounds of stakeholder engagement, and iterative prototyping. The effort culminated in the UK Co-benefits Atlas, a comprehensive resource spanning over 400 pages. The project introduces a five-dimensional framework centered on data, people, stories, context, and the atlas itself, integrating interactive visualization, explanatory narrative, and participatory design to support both guided exploration and interpretive presentation. Beyond delivering a functional atlas, the research uncovers key user behaviors, including interest-driven navigation, friction caused by data overload, and interaction patterns shaped by real-world usage scenarios, thereby offering a structured design paradigm for visualizing complex policy-related data.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

This paper reports on the process of designing the UK Co-Benefits Atlas, which communicates and publicizes data for climate mitigation. Visualization atlases -- an emerging type of platform to make data about complex topics comprehensive through interactive visualizations and explanatory content -- pose challenges beyond traditional visualization projects. Atlases must address diverse and often uncertain audiences and use cases, support both explanatory and guided exploration, and accommodate complex, evolving data. Over 10 months, our team of visualization and domain experts conducted 8 design workshops, iterative prototyping, 15 stakeholder onboarding sessions, and continuous reflection. These intertwined processes informed the development of the Atlas, comprising over 400 pages of visualizations and explanations. They also enabled a deeper understanding of how stakeholders may critically engage with the atlas in practice, in terms of interests, potential frictions when navigating huge amounts of data, and envisioned usage scenarios. Reflecting on our design process, we identify five driving forces in atlas design -- data, people, stories, context, and the atlas itself -- whose shifting dynamics influence different stages of visualization atlas design in different ways. Grounded in our case study, we discuss using these forces as a conceptual starting point for structuring and reflecting on future atlas design processes.

Problem

• visualization atlas
• climate mitigation
• interactive visualization
• data communication
• design challenges

Innovation

• visualization atlas
• co-benefits
• climate mitigation
• design framework
• interactive visualization