Situatedness in Visualization Design: Making Unresolved Work Actionable

2026-08-08

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of visualization design under conditions of ambiguity—such as unclear objectives, indeterminate data, and evolving requirements—where existing frameworks inadequately explain how designers proceed without a clear direction. Through a three-phase qualitative investigation analyzing practice excerpts from 11 expert designers, the research uncovers how practitioners navigate uncertainty by engaging in provisional, localized actions. These actions intertwine contextual awareness, professional judgment, and explicit reasoning to render ill-defined problems operational and dynamically steer design decisions. The study identifies core strategies through which designers use such localized moves to reveal patterns, clarify pathways, and reorient their design trajectories. These findings offer empirical grounding and theoretical insight into the inherently dynamic and non-predetermined nature of real-world visualization design practice.

Abstract

Visualization design often proceeds under unresolved conditions---goals shift, data remain provisional, stakeholder needs evolve, and several plausible directions may remain available at once. Existing visualization frameworks help organize design work and articulate major decisions, yet offer limited explanation of how practitioners proceed before a path forward has become clear. Drawing on an episode-level analysis of a previously collected three-phase qualitative corpus involving eleven expert visualization practitioners, we examine situations in which the problem, representational target, or viable direction remained unsettled. We find that practitioners make such situations actionable through provisional local moves. These moves reveal patterns, distinctions, and interpretive possibilities; clarify what is tractable, viable, or worth pursuing; and sometimes reorient the work itself. The analysis shows that situated action, professional judgment, and explicit design reasoning are intertwined in expert practice. It also identifies a practical limit on how fully design activity can be specified in advance. When the meaning of the next move depends on what a situation reveals in response to action, prescriptive decision structures cannot fully determine the course of design. The paper contributes an empirical account of situatedness in visualization practice and explains how local action makes unresolved work interpretable enough for consequential design decisions.

Problem

• situatedness
• visualization design
• unresolved conditions
• design reasoning
• expert practice

Innovation

• situatedness
• provisional local moves
• visualization design
• design reasoning
• expert practice