Poster

Interdisciplinary practices in
information design and visualization
14–16 November 2025
Boston, MA USA

 

Schedule & Program

Keynote Speakers

Bronwen Robertson
Bronwen Robertson
Data4Change
Bronwen Robertson is one of the co-founders of Data4Change. For more than a decade she has worked alongside human rights organisations worldwide, developing community-led approaches to data and storytelling that resist extractive practices. With a background spanning research, technology, and advocacy, she has published widely on the role of culture and creativity in social change. Bronwen is committed to equity, collaboration, and to building data practices that centre the people too often excluded from data yet most affected by the decisions it drives.


Kennedy Elliott
Kennedy Elliott
The New York Times
Kennedy joins us from The New York Times, where she is an editor on the Graphics desk focusing on political coverage. She previously worked at National Geographic, where she led a team of visual journalists who created digital graphics, and The Washington Post, where she was a graphics editor. Her work centers on explanatory visual journalism: designing charts, maps and other graphics that help readers make sense of complex political and social issues. Over the past decade, she has guided coverage ranging from U.S. elections and the administration to environmental and scientific topics. Kennedy is passionate about the role of visuals in public understanding and about editing as a craft of clarity, collaboration and informational storytelling.


Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma
Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma
Emory University
Lauren Klein is Professor of Data & Decision Sciences and English at Emory University, where she directs the Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Her research bridges data science, AI ethics, and American literature and culture, with attention to questions of gender and race. She is the author of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020, with Catherine D’Ignazio) and An Archive of Taste (Minnesota, 2020). Her forthcoming book, co-authored with Tanvi Sharma, retells the history of data visualization alongside the histories of colonialism and slavery. Tanvi Sharma Tanvi is a designer working at the intersection of data, design, and the humanities. She previously worked at Pentagram, Spotify and Public Policy Lab.



Time MIT (Fri) NEU (Sat) NEU (Sun)
08:00:00 Registration MIT Registration Northeastern
08:00:00 Registration Northeastern
08:40:00 Workshops
09:00:00 Welcome Presentations
09:00:00 Keynote -- Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma
10:00:00 Coffee break Coffee break Coffee break
10:40:00 Workshops Presentations Presentations
12:00:00 Lunch Lunch Lunch
13:40:00 Workshops Presentations Presentations
15:00:00 Coffee break Coffee break Coffee break
15:20:00 Presentations
15:40:00 Workshops Keynote -- Kennedy Elliott
15:40:00 Coffee break
16:20:00 Presentations
16:20:00 Closing
17:30:00 Keynote - Bronwen Robertson
18:00:00 Social dinner
18:30:00 Exhibition reception

Accepted talks

Ethics / Justice / Diversity

The Atlas of Popular Transport: Subverting the Atlas as a Tool of Collective Intelligence

Alberto Meouchi

In Plain Sight

Gauri Bahuguna

Lost in Transliteration: Visualizing the Algorithmic Misreadings of Chinese Names

Liuhuaying Yang

Emotional Geographies of the Mediterranean

Marcella Del Signore

Visualizing Salary Inequity: Data as a Catalyst for Institutional Change in Higher Education

MiHyun Kim

Overcoming Epistemic Barriers in Data Advocacy: A Framework for Inclusive Information Design

Mohsin Yousufi

Education / Pedagogy

Pedagogies of Practice: Teaching Information Design in an Eco-Social Context

Alessia Musio

Digital Humanities / Museums / Culture

Flow States: Designing visually fluid visualisation and interface tools to support humanistic-centred enquiry and discovery.

Andrew Richardson

Critical Visualization

Pluriversal Civic Encounters: experimental practices of participatory data visualisation from the local

Barbara Urrutia-Badilla

Timeline Architectures: Platform Temporalities and the Design of Online Attention

Oliver Arellano-Padilla

Soft Sites: Textiles as Feminist Praxis

Sophie Chien

Art / Design

Reimagining Research: Gaming, Data + Research Integration

Cary Staples

Politics / Democracy

Data resistance: counter data practices against state-led urban redevelopment in Seoul’s urban manufacturing district

Chaewon Ahn

Visualizing Political Infrastructures of Inequality: A Radical Atlas

Patty Heyda

The New Necro-Nominalism

Samuel Holleran

Distance Unknown: Visualizing the Costs and Risks of Migration in the Americas

Sarah Williams

Visualization in Practice

Designing While Furious

Dana Ragouzeos

Visualizing Environmental Justice: Shaping Urban Policy

Dare Brawley, Mario Giampieri

The Design Work You Don’t See: How Practitioners Frame Problems Before Visualizing Anything

Paul Parsons

Do This Instead: 4 Powerful (and Empowering) Alternatives to Common Charts

Zan Armstrong

Design / Data & Philosophy

Theories of change in visualization

Dietmar Offenhuber

Mapping Shelter, Modeling Care: Participatory Spatial Data from Migrants in Transit

Marcos Escamilla-Guerrero

Books that describe the world through the eyes

Paul Kahn

Echoes of Knowing: Toward an Acoustic Epistemology of Information

Paula Martin Rivero

Environment / Climate

Deep Sea Literacy: Cartographic Activations for Planetary Hydro-Commons

Gokcen Erkilic

Fragile Frontlines: An Atlas of Loss and Damage in the Third Pole

Madeeha Merchant

The Vital Aesthetics of Biodiversity Data: Reconnecting Ecological Relations within Digital Systems

Michelle Westerlaken

Data Journalism / Media

Explaining Geopolitics Through Data and Geography: The Financial Times’ Visual Storytelling Approach

Irene de la Torre Arenas

What it takes to design visual stories in local journalism

Yuqing Liu

Accessibility / Disability

Beyond the Visual: Creating multimodal displays for maximizing ocean science engagement

Jessica Roberts

Decentering Vision in Accessible Visualization

Jonathan Zong

Sparkling conversations with data to empowering communities in Latinoamerica

Jose Duarte

Experimental Data Visualization

Microbial Interfaces

Katia Zolotovsky

Data feminism in action: mapping Urban Belonging in Copenhagen with experimental visualization and participatory GIS

Sofie Burgos-Thorsen

Information Design Project

From Data to Impact: Strengthening Pro-Democracy Work Through Design

Meaghan Barry

Emergent Technology

Does visualization help AI understand data?

Johnathan Sun, Victoria Li