The privilege and responsibility of seeing radically
Steven Braun |
TEDxNortheasternU
• October 2020
In his creative practice, Steven Braun asks what it means to regard data visualization as one of many "technologies of seeing": technologies that make choices (both deliberate and not) about what is worthy of being rendered visible in the eyes of others. In visualization, design choices are made about what data to collect, how to analyze them, and how to express them through visual encodings, and these choices determine whose voices or identities get privileged or displaced in public discourses. Such choices are tightly wrapped up in questions of visibility and challenge us to consider what it means to think of seeing as a political and compositional act, especially at a time when "crises of seeing" threaten our individual and collective well-being. As a research-practitioner whose academic background is rooted in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Steven studies these questions through information design and visualization as applied practice, seeking to critique and deconstruct the choices of visibility that are built into the architecture of technologies we take for granted. Steven offers a reflection on this creative practice through recent projects that interrogate the role of visualization and seeing as an act of documentation and bearing witness, particularly when situated in a world in trauma, transition, and uncertainty.