VizChitra 2025

Describe your talk:

Imagine if data didn’t need us to visualize it? What if, instead of designing static charts, we designed systems where data could shape its own form—emerging, evolving, and revealing insights on its own?

This session is an introduction to Emergent Narratives, reimagining data visualization as a self-organizing and self-visualizing process. Borrowing ideas from nature, generative design, and traditional knowledge systems, this talk will introduce a new mental model for how we approach visualization. While “generative” has become synonymous with AI and creative coding, this session will expand the concept, showing how data, when given the right conditions or constraints, can take shape dynamically—beyond screens, beyond predefined graphs, and into the real world.

We’ll explore self-visualizing systems—where data leaves an inherent trace, accumulating, interacting, and structuring itself into readable patterns, just like tree rings encoding growth history, or urban crowds shaping real-time participatory maps. We will understand how to allow emergent narratives to form—revealing patterns we might never have anticipated.

• What is a self-visualizing viz and how to think about it?
• References and examples of it around us with classifications.
• How to actively develop such a viz which can be applied to any medium?

1-2 takeaways:

• Attendees will gain a new perspective on generative data visualization, moving beyond AI and code-based approaches to understand how data itself can become a self-expressive medium in physical, participatory, and interactive spaces.
• Participants will leave with a structured framework for designing self-visualizing systems, learning how to create data narratives that emerge organically—whether through live interaction, accumulation over time, or environmental embedding.

Who is the audience:

This talk is for Data viz practitioners, Information designers, Product designers, generative artists, researchers in complex systems, and anyone curious about pushing the boundaries of what data can do. It is especially relevant to those exploring new modes of storytelling, participatory experiences, and computational design, offering fresh approaches that take visualization beyond the screen and into real-world, living systems.

About me:

I am Vivek Menon, a Product Designer at Microsoft, where I have been shaping the future of Microsoft Excel for the past four years. I have a background in Graphic Design from NID Ahmedabad and a Master’s in Digital Direction from the Royal College of Art (RCA) London, where I did my master’s dissertation on this topic. I have experience in design, technology, and narratives. I explore emergent systems in visualization, computational storytelling, and self-organizing information structures—rethinking how we design for complexity, participation, and interactivity in digital and physical spaces.
(I have taught this concept at Sristhi, as well as DTU where students enjoyed the concept! I also apply these concepts to improve visualisation at Excel.)
Website: https://www.vivekme.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivek-menon-a26018a9/