VizChitra 2025

Context

System design courses, typically offered in the penultimate semester of design school, are often considered among the most demanding. This is primarily due to the overwhelming amount of information that must be condensed into flowcharts and visualized for easy comprehension. Giga maps have emerged as a familiar format that is well-suited to this task, allowing designers to represent both context and the identified interventions proposed for a given solution.

About

In this session, I walk attendees through the various conscious and unconscious design choices that shaped an experimental exhibition titled Washaway - an interactive experimental exhibition, a representation of my journey as an Exhibition design student into the field of data visualization.
What began as a seemingly simple inquiry into fast fashion soon turned into a deep dive, leading me to explore questions such as: Could buying, caring for, and discarding clothes be a political statement? While triggers prompt us to buy and discard, what prompts us to consider the lifecycle of our clothes? Do they miraculously clean themselves in the laundry? Did our grandmothers bear the brunt of laundry duty? And why was it often their responsibility in the first place?

Washaway explores the use of physical spaces to design the activity of
Data visualization as an immersive experience, right from the methods used to collect data to the systems used to visualize the data. Washaway tries to navigate the space formed by the intersection of data and design.

About 102 people took part in this social experiment: The Washaway Project - which was later presented as an exhibition under the provocation: “Can we make data disappear?”

Takeaways

• Can the systems and the methods used to visualize data be self-reflective and provoke conversations around the ethics of data visualization?
• How can more democratic experiences be designed that act as spaces for dialogue?
• What role can exhibition design play to facilitate narratives within information design?
• How can various disciplines contribute to reinterpreting the field of data visualization? Is data visualization one of the most inherently collaborative domains?

Audience

For anyone open to relooking at the field of data visualization through different perspectives, contexts, and purposes.

About me

My name is Arundathi Rajan. I am a final-year undergraduate student of Exhibition Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. I look for stories everywhere I go, and storytelling has become a huge part of how I approach any given brief. Apart from the jargon, I’m curious to learn about almost everything under the sun and hope to start a design studio soon while also writing a book, making a movie, and opening an ice cream shop. The ice cream shop might take priority. I am currently in the process of finishing up my graduation project titled “Reimagining Interactions between Humans and Data” sponsored by the Ford Foundation Grant.