I want to open with the statement that Shirley Wu is one of my favorite people in our field. Shirley does excellent work, is a deeply thoughtful person, and is broadly recognized by our peers as one of the most important people of our time.

But I’m a bit disheartened. In her recent blog post “Beyond the Plateau” (an excellent piece that is part of an unbelievably good series), she talks about how our field seems to have hit a plateau. And she proposes a “new” term that she believes will help us understand why that isn’t a bad thing:

Data experiences: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “experience” as “(noun) direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge,” or even better, “something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through.”

I’m defining data experience as anything that enables us to personally encounter data as a way to expand our personal and collective knowledge. I like this definition because it is intentionally broad and inclusive. It can contain within it data visualizations, sonifications, physicalizations, smellifications, or things we have yet to define and be inspired by.

Of course, I love this. I just want that to be clear. But we’ve been talking about “data experiences” already for years. Our definition of this term might differ (and Shirley’s is arguably more romantic), but the way we have used it for years now has been centered on people with disabilities. “Data experiences” was a way for us to peel apart and de-center this idea that visualization alone will save us, but data experiences can bring us together.

And to complicate this conversation (if you can call a blog post responding to a blog post a conversation at all): my little subfield of accessibility is in a canyon, a rift far below sea level. We’ve been trying to climb out of this for decades. We are far from being ubiquitous and certainly not at a place where our creativity (or demand for it) is at a plateau.

And that is where I am a bit depressed. Does she not know? More importantly: does our field? Perhaps my space (inclusion, disability, etc) has just been too far divorced from the rest of our community? Perhaps our rift is so wide and deep that everyone can’t see us from all the way up on this plateau.

Origins and why “data experiences” matter

Marion Lean, whose 2020 PhD thesis was titled “Materializing Data Experience” is focused on a wonderful and provocative ethos for why “data experiences” are worth it: they include people in meaningful experiences. Lean’s entire thesis focuses on this ethical dimension, framed from a feminist direction, as an imperative for understanding that human-to-data relationships are interactive and can produce deep and meaningful experiences. And that if we take this for what it can accomplish, then the best use of data experiences are towards including people who have been excluded or left at the margins. Lean’s current professional work focuses on that now.

So sure, Shirley’s definition can be the one we use. I like it. Inclusion is at the heart of her argument, too. And Shirley likely has a large enough readership (and is respected well enough) that this is probably going to be where we mark the watershed moment for our field. I’m actually 100% okay with that.

But it feels important to me to really impress on the community that the reason we’ve already been using this term is because of the inclusion of people with disabilities. It’s okay with me if we re-purpose “data experiences” to broaden the umbrella. Maybe we should.

In Shirley’s blog, she writes that the term is “inclusive” because is definitionally or semantically inclusive (it applies to visualizations, sonificiations, physicalizations, etc). She also writes extensively (in the whole first half of the blog) that the point is about inclusion. So, I’m sure she’d agree with me when I say that I just don’t want us to forget people with disabilities in all of this. If we de-center people with disabilities, I just don’t want us to become forgotten.

Explicitly naming who has been excluded and why, really matters. This was at the heart of our use of the term for the past few years. And I felt compelled to write this blog just as a reminder of our story, in case we forget (because we are often forgotten).

And to be clear: The point of all of this is to be more inclusive. Our community is growing. We have a bigger tent now.

But my challenge to Shirley (and our field) is this: why isn’t there any mention of “disability” or people with disabilities in this vision of the future? And why is the only mention of “accessibility” really just the broad use of the term (not specifically about the field of accessibility as it centers on people with disabilities)?

I hope that broadening our language doesn’t come at a cost! Our little history, our hard-fought battles on twitter and linkedin, our talks and articles and prototypes… these are all part of the “data experiences” I know. But to our fault, we are still pretty obscure.

I know that Shirley has her finger on the pulse of our field. Reading the article this morning I thought to myself, “Surely Shirley is aware that one of the major advancements in our field in the last 5 years has centered on how we think about designing for and with people with disabilities?” But perhaps not!

If we aren’t being consciously or actively excluded (I really doubt Shirley knew about our use of the term beforehand), then is our work actually less relevant than I thought? Perhaps, yet again, this is a moment where I confront how far we still have to go.

It makes me a bit depressed, in some ways. Will we ever be part of the tent? Will our community ever really come around?

(I know this entire blog post might seem frantic, misguided, or even confrontational, but that is only because I simply don’t have time to write this up with better prose. Her post is now and I have deadlines in 2 days. Shirley is a widely impactful artist and thinker in our field and if I wait too long to say my thoughts, time will have passed. I already have the disadvantage of my relative insignificance, so I want to at least join the conversation before it is over.)

My focus on “data experiences”

In 2018 or so, I was at Visa. And Chris DeMartini, with immense foresight, decided to name our group the “Visa Data Experience Team.” And if I recall correctly, Eric William Lin’s team in 2021 at CNN (or was it Capital One before that?) was also a “Data Experience” team. So in the professional world of things, the idea of a more inclusive term was already being kicked around.

Chris’s motivation was because “experiences” is more inclusive of the breadth of what we do (we didn’t just visualize data). A foundational part of our work was making our chart library (Visa Chart Components) accessible for people with disabilities from the start. Much of this work involved making it work for folks who couldn’t see. A “data experience” was an upgrade from thinking about visuals by themselves. But also: we wanted “experience” to capture the essence of interactivity that was central to our work. Our charts weren’t just output systems (data in, chart out). Our work was founded on the expectation that humans will want to click, select, hover, filtering, munge, crunch, dig, and sort their data. This universe of interactions are analytical at their heart, and those motivations for working with data precede visuals. So to really communicate what our team was up to, “data experiences” seemed like the best foot forward.

This term and idea was so foundational that the brilliant (genius, really) Lilach Manheim featured “data experiences” as a central concept in her “Data Experience Critique Framework.”

I certainly didn’t coin “data experiences.” Lean likely didn’t either. I think for at least a decade, if not more, this term has been floating in the ether of our collective ideation. We’ve shared it back and forth, tried to hone it, and find a place for it.

But for Chartability, which was a project I started in 2020, I went looking for new ways to define my work. I needed a new term. A workbook for making “data visualizations” more accessible for people with disabilities didn’t really encompass everything that the project was about. We were interested in accessibility and disability far more than just the realm of human vision (and those excluded from experiences that assume things about human vision). And given the philosophical evolution of our team at Visa combined with when I first found Lean’s work, I realized that the direction forward was to focus on “data experiences.” I had a professional framing for the term. But Lean gave me that ethical imperative: “data experience” is about the inclusion of people in meaningful interactions.

Our main page for Chartability introduces this terminology shift:

What is Data Visualization? Data Visualization (also sometimes abbreviated as dataviz or datavis) is presenting data in a structured, symbolic way. The structure and semantics go beyond the visual, however, so we prefer to call these data experiences.

And Chartability’s workbook goes a little further:

*A data experience (DX) could refer to a data visualization such as a chart, graph, or plot, a “bespoke” (highly customized) graphic based on data, a model, or an algorithm, or a data driven interface or system. If a human has an experience with data using any of their senses, then it counts as a data experience. We intentionally use an inclusive term.

And in our Fireside Chat on Accessible Data Visualization with the Data Visualization Society in July of 2021, we mention “data experiences” and “experiences” with data throughout.

Lastly, and this is more of a passing remark than anything else, but just before I started my PhD in 2021, the immortal Alberto Cairo was having a chat with me and I was explaining “data experiences” to him. At the time, he was courting the idea to me that I should write a book on accessible visualization, which would have required me to put my PhD on hold for a year. But when I explained the term to him he replied, “Data experiences? That should be the title of your book!”

So perhaps the onus was on me, all along. If I wanted our definition of “data experiences” to really be explicit about the inclusion of people with disabilities, I should have said it sooner on a bigger stage.

And of course, there is still time to change people’s minds on all of this. There is still time for the big players, the Shirley Wu’s out there, to realize that one of the largest valleys (a canyon, really) is still the exclusion of people with disabilities from meaningful interaction experiences with data.

What matters? What should you, reader, take away from this?

Why did I even write all of this? Well, I wrote it with the simple point: that “data experiences” matter because they include people left at the margins, and that people with disabilities are still among the most excluded.

Disability intersects and compounds with race-based exclusion, economic exclusion, exclusion based on gender and sexuality, lack of access to healthcare, lack of access to broadband internet, fascist, imperialist, colonial, and authoritarian oppression, and more. Disability is a thread woven across virtually every community. And if “data experiences” as a term fails to acknowledge that, it still has maturing to do.

“Data experiences” is a term already claimed by feminists artists and designers, disability advocates, researchers, and working professionals. And we claim it because of what it does and what it means for our field: we’re becoming more inclusive.

So it might seem like visualization has “hit a plateau” in recent years. But people with disabilities are still in a canyon, a rift in the earth that is wide and deep.

The good news is that we’ve seen a meteoric rise in interest related to making data, charts, and graphs more accessible for people with disabilities, almost conveniently coinciding with the ubiquity and breadth of visualization’s adoption (which is the primary condition for its plateau’ing). So hopefully the momentum we have right now continues to materialize into meaningful innovation and collaboration alongside people with disabilities.

Shirley remarks that she is glad for the plateau for many reasons. And I’d argue that practitioners should be thankful as well. A plateau is a good sign.

But in my work? We still have quite a climb ahead of us, even just to catch up, let alone freely innovate towards new, possible futures.

Our own plateau is still far, far away.