How Visualization Designers Perceive and Use Inspiration

TL;DR

This paper explores how professional visualization designers perceive and utilize inspiration, revealing diverse sources and practices that influence their creative process and highlighting implications for design theory and tool development.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into designers' inspiration sources and practices, addressing a gap in understanding the role of inspiration in visualization design.

Findings

Designers draw inspiration from visualizations, real-world phenomena, and personal experiences.

Inspiration practices include active searching and passive observation, often leading to original designs.

Implications for visualization tools and training to better support inspiration in design.

Abstract

Inspiration plays an important role in design, yet its specific impact on data visualization design practice remains underexplored. This study investigates how professional visualization designers perceive and use inspiration in their practice. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine their sources of inspiration, the value they place on them, and how they navigate the balance between inspiration and imitation. Our findings reveal that designers draw from a diverse array of sources, including existing visualizations, real-world phenomena, and personal experiences. Participants describe a mix of active and passive inspiration practices, often iterating on sources to create original designs. This research offers insights into the role of inspiration in visualization practice, the need to expand visualization design theory, and the implications for the development of visualization tools that support inspiration and for training future visualization designers.