VizChitra 2025: India's first community-driven Data Visualization conference

I see visualization as a tool that leverages human perception to understand and explore data. While this perspective might sound obvious, it’s not common to see in visualization works. More often, charts aim to summarize rather than engage. In this talk, I’ll walk through the design of an interactive visualization based on India’s population census. The visualization is available here.

We’ll go through some of the decisions that shaped the visualization—and how the perspective from the first sentence guided those decisions.

To list a few implications of the perspective:

• Visualization in service of framing better questions out of data
• Simplify visualization, not data
• Building a visual language for complex data
• Optimize for perception (comparisons, visual quirks)
• Using the medium (browsers interactions, animations, scroll)

The talk will cover some of the tricks of the trade, but always in service of reinforcing one core perspective: visualization is a tool that uses human perception to make sense of data. Which I have found to be useful when faced with understanding and communicating data/ideas.

I’m ciju. A programmer with interest and ignorance in a few different fields. Currently working on Fin Bodhi and writing at ciju.in.