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

In a world where rectangular dashboards dominate our screens one can easily ask—Why rectangle? Despite the diversity of industries and use cases, most dashboard solutions follow identical patterns, standard charts, and linear information flows. Although they perform well for today’s audience, what can we do when our data consumption habits and visualisation needs evolve?

This talk takes you on a journey to a different world. Through glimpses of different formats that deviate from traditional methods it will showcase the need to evolve—with a ‘show don’t tell’ approach. It starts with an iconic data-visualisation example that affected the lives of a community through innovative visualisation. Then it take the presentation through real-life examples of the speaker’s and other professional’s projects. Through these examples it will present points on how certain elements of a dashboard can be presented differently. Elements like:

• Spatial relationships between related data points
• How to represent stakeholders of the data in the dashboard
• Supports non-linear presentations
• Accommodates future visual needs as interactions evolve beyond screens

Overall the presentation will include:

1. Limitations of traditional dashboard methods
2. The need to evolve
3. Du Bois’s innovative examples for charts
4. Recent examples: Parliamentary Election of Mongolia 2024 (circular), What does it take for research to flourish? (organic shapes), Building a Climate Conscious India (Illustrated approach)
5. Speaker’s project: Food traceability dashboard for 2050
6. Take aways to actively start implementing these new ways (5-8 points)

The audience of this talk is mostly beginners and intermediary professionals. But anyone curious to explore and enage with new work is welcomed.

Speaker Profile:
Vaidehi Shirsath is a visual designer and data visualisation student at Social Innovation Studio; Longlisted for IIB 2025.
Website: https://www.vaidehishirsath.com