Can we save DataViz? Or is it just dashboards now?
2012 was a heady time. I had left science to try turning a hobby, graphic design, into a career. What I didn’t realize was how lucky my timing was. Data visualization was gaining serious traction in the public eye: to reckon with big data, newspapers, branding agencies, and corporations all wanted to get in on infographics — the crest of the first data viz wave.
The demand for infographics, and data visualization more generally, promised a unique opportunity for oddballs: a place where science and art met; where skills in programming, analysis, and design might all be useful— and bring remunerative, non-boring work.
I’ve been lucky, perhaps talented, and been able to live at this strange intersection for a while now. But I worry that it’s getting smaller. The fad for infoposters is certainly over (while a limited demand persists). Journalists are still making charts (sometimes very innovative ones), but how many outlets can actually fund that work? Perusing the job boards, everthing relating to visualization is now business analytics — meaning dashboards.
As Elijah Meeks and others have pointed out, this kind of work is legitimate but extremely conservative: it’s mostly lines, bars, and maybe a fuel gauge. It’s about as far from “data art” as you can get (outside of academia, where a raw ggplot2 chart is still perfectly acceptable). Naturally, it’s engineers who get hired for this work; for it’s primarily technical. It’s front-end development, data wrangling, pipes, and databases.
This is all fine, as far as it goes. But I wonder, where is the design any more? Where is that intersection of unique skills?
This is not, of course, a problem for business: they are not obligated to hire me to do the work I want to do. But it is perhaps a problem for the data viz field, if it even exists. If all we have is engineering and some D3 libraries, we don’t have a unique field after all. What we had, perhaps, was a brief coming together of engineering and design that has bifurcated again. Designers, even “information designers” will mostly go back into the little pockets they existed in before any of this “DataViz” stuff happened.
The very related question, which Elijah also raises, is what happens to current people in the data viz world. Where do they go when their 30s are over, and they’re sick of doing the grunt work (a bit of code monkey, analyst, and junior designer). There is no obvious route to promotion, except in the very very very rare cases of a newspaper room or design shop employing multiple people in DataViz, and needing a director for the department. Thus do you have the engineering types hopping over to call themselves data scientists instead — and perhaps eventually management. Design has always had a narrow funnel of advancement, with not much coming after designer: art/creative director is a big step away. But what role is there for a creative director who understands data too? And so we have the bifurcation again, as experienced practitioners try to get out of the trenches: they have to find a more traditional home elsewhere.
I want data visualization, or data design, to be a thing. I want it to be a viable career track — even if it’s a small field. I want this for a few reasons.
One: I’m selfish, and want options for more interesting work — even though I’ve never had a hard time finding anything yet.
Two: there are already few enough career tracks for people who sit at the dividing line between art and science and technicality (architecture is one; and a tough way to make a living).
Three: data really is important in our world, and communicating data is too; it’s not just an engineering task.
Four: I worry that big business will eventually realize that real-time dashboards are not that helpful. And maybe they were all just a fad. So who even needs DataViz? Let’s just get the AI to tell us what to do.
Am I missing something? Where can DataViz go from here?
