Designing Encounters
Curating political discourse through the intersections of design & data
Arundathi Rajan
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India
KEYWORD
#data visceralization #information design #public participation
#research through design #data physicalization
ABSTRACT
“Chennai Votes: People vs Ideology” draws on the concept of data visceralization, the idea that data need not speak only to the eyes but can be made legible to the whole body. It was designed as a public participation experiment designed to understand what motivates people to vote, create space for political dialogue, and offer first-time voters a reflective platform for civic engagement. The core question of the experiment was, “Does a young woman in a marketplace approach politics differently than an older man in a quiet residential area?” The project is part of a larger design research inquiry titled “Reimagining Interactions Between Humans And Data” that investigates how principles of Exhibition Design might contribute meaningfully to Information Design.
CREATIVE PROCESS
Modular water dispenser cardboard structures were developed for rapid assembly across five locations. Participants were asked to choose between two opaque water stations labeled “People” (representing candidates) and “Ideology.” By drawing a glass of water to cast a vote, participants engaged with a medium that is inherently difficult to quantify, intended to mirror the uncertainty of political decision-making. The design did not mimic a household water dispenser. Instead, it incorporated a degree of novelty, adhering to the critical design principle that “a slight strangeness is the key” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 94).
IMPLICATIONS & NEXT STEPS
While the inquiry helped me develop a unique design vocabulary, the constraints of this format preclude a full expansion on that evolution. Approaching public space as a site for dialogue, rather than just display, shifted how this project unfolded. Although findings from hyper-local interventions are inherently non-generalizable, the underlying strategies for curation, messaging, and community-engaged data collection offer replicable frameworks for information design. Replicating this model across different neighborhoods can reveal how diverse communities interpret the civic and political forces shaping their everyday spaces; provided the medium is carefully calibrated to local contexts.
References
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11805.001.0001
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jansen, Y., Dragicevic, P., Isenberg, P., Alexander, J., Karnik, A., Kildal, J., Subramanian, S., & Hornbæk, K. (2015, April). Opportunities and challenges for data physicalization. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 3227–3236. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702180
Bhargava, R., & D’Ignazio, C. (2017). Data sculptures as a playful and low-tech introduction to working with data. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’17 Companion), Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 372–376. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064857.3079183