Judgment as Coordination: A Joint Systems View of Visualization Design Practice

TL;DR

This paper presents a systems-level view of visualization design judgment, emphasizing coordination, adaptation, and systemic practices in collaborative professional environments, moving beyond individual decision-making models.

Contribution

It introduces a joint systems perspective on visualization design, highlighting systemic coordination and repair processes as central to professional practice.

Findings

Design coherence often maintained through repair and reframing, not optimal choices.

Empirical studies reveal recurring coordination episodes in design teams.

Joint Cognitive Systems framework illuminates distributed judgment in practice.

Abstract

Professional visualization design has become an increasingly important area of inquiry, yet much of the field's discourse remains anchored in researcher-centered contexts. Studies of design practice often focus on individual designers' decisions and reflections, offering limited insight into the collaborative and systemic dimensions of professional work. In this paper, we propose a systems-level reframing of design judgment grounded in the coordination and adaptation that sustain progress amid uncertainty, constraint, and misalignment. Drawing on sustained engagement across multiple empirical studies--including ethnographic observation of design teams and qualitative studies of individual practitioners--we identify recurring episodes in which coherence was preserved not by selecting an optimal option, but by repairing alignment, adjusting plans, and reframing goals. We interpret these dynamics through the lens of Joint Cognitive Systems, which provide tools for analyzing how judgment emerges as a distributed capacity within sociotechnical activity. This perspective surfaces often-invisible work in visualization design and offers researchers a new conceptual vocabulary for studying how design activity is sustained in practice.