VizChitra 2025

About

What power structures can be dismantled when the power to speak the language of data becomes accessible to everyone? The Daily Data Project is a workshop designed to engage in a discourse on creating data visualizations using everyday household objects. The workshop introduces a toolkit developed as a part of my graduation project, which acts as a vertical to simplify the visualization process. While the toolkit offers structure and encourages participants to experiment and explore freely, the key purpose of the workshop is to develop visualizations on a particular city’s transport system and services. And for a city like Bangalore, the results would be quite interesting to observe. This workshop has been conducted so far at:

• Science Gallery, Bangalore (as a part of their ongoing exhibition, Sci560)
  Number of Participants: 25 (3.5 hours)
• The Learning Community at Quest (independently organised)
  Number of Participants: 25 (4 hours)

Objectives

• To create data objects that spark a conversation about the current politics of data recording, questioning who gets to record data, and who holds the agency in this process.
• To critically engage with data visualization projects, aiming not only to reduce the intimidation often associated with data visualizations but also to help participants avoid creating visuals that might feel overwhelming or inaccessible.
• To understand how everyday household objects can be encoded with data in various ways, either to complement the data itself, serve as inspiration for identifying certain data patterns, or highlight gaps in available information.

Takeaways

• To encourage the participants to pay more attention to the functioning of their immediate surroundings, and to inspect how individual lived realities can be reflective of larger societal systems.
• To explore mediums that can effectively amplify individual voices
• To serve as a starting point for the participants of the workshop to embark on journeys to describe their personal stories.

Audience

For data visualization enthusiasts, experts, and beginners who want to get their hands dirty with data - to give form to that which goes unnoticed.

Bio

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.