How Visualization Designers Perceive and Use Inspiration

TL;DR

The paper investigates how visualization designers perceive and use inspiration in professional practice using semi-structured interviews with 14 practitioners. It identifies diverse inspiration sources, distinctions between active and passive practices, and strategies for balancing imitation with ownership, revealing both benefits and risks to creativity. The findings extend existing design and visualization literature by highlighting non-visual sources of inspiration, the role of precedent knowledge, and the need to integrate inspiration into visualization design frameworks and tooling. The work offers practical implications for visualization education, tool design, and future research, emphasizing practice-focused inquiry to enhance creativity and mitigate fixation in design practice.

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.