Vernacular Visualization Practices

Dr. Snyder is a Professor who specializes in Visualization Studies and Critical Visual Design Research. In her paper, Vernacular Visualization Practices, she turns a critical eye on the rigid structures of information design and presents an argument for a more human-centered approach. As part of her research, she asked people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder who self-track their symptoms to illustrate timelines of their experiences with their mental illness. The results are not necessarily quantitative or scientific, but they do give us a better understanding of these patients' lived experiences in a way that methodological diagraming never could. In addition to helping the outside world understand the patients, it also helped the patients better understand themselves. Repeated practice of this activity helped to validate the experiences of these people who "may have experienced doubt, scorn, or distrust from society over the course of their lives."

Critics of this vernacular technique say it is" one that does not come from the visualization community, and that violates some of the golden rules of traditional visualization design.” However, Dr. Snyder argues that the disparity between information visualizations made by non-experts and those made by experts “surface opportunities for deeper understanding of visualizations in communicating data-driven information to diverse audiences and among stakeholders with heterogenous expertise and needs.” This mentality can also be applied to a broader design context. It is generally accepted that elitism is a pervasive fault in the design community. Rather than ridiculing the products of non-design experts who break our “golden rules,” perhaps we can look at those disparities with a critical eye on our own practice and see it as an opportunity to understand how design conventions can be adjusted to fit a more human-centered context.