VIS Panels: Visualization as a Foundational Act of Placemaking: Future Places and Alien Worlds

Session chair:Helen-Nicole Kostis

Room:America South

Time:Thursday, Nov 12 @ 13:00 - 14:30 (US/Eastern)

Placemaking is the process by which spaces acquire meaning, identity, and human belonging. This panel examines how visualization participates in that process when places are not yet fully formed through lived experience. While placemaking has traditionally depended on accumulated lived experience through movement, memory, and storytelling that transform coordinates into meaningful places, visualization has typically supported this process by helping communities understand and communicate about already inhabited environments. This relationship is now shifting. Future places on Earth such as coastlines reshaped by sea level rise, cities transformed by climate change, and ecosystems in transition remain grounded in human experience but are entering conditions not yet collectively lived or remembered. In contrast, worlds beyond Earth including lunar habitats, Martian surfaces, and off world settlements have only limited and episodic human presence and no sustained accumulated human experience. Yet decisions about both domains are already underway, requiring publics and decision makers to engage with places that are not yet experientially real. We argue that in these contexts visualization must do much of the work of placemaking itself, constructing scale, orientation, emotional resonance, narrative, and trust directly from data. This opens new opportunities at the intersection of visualization, AI, and HCI, including generative methods, new data modalities, and interaction techniques for storytelling and sensemaking, while raising challenges around agency, narrative, and trust. This panel explores visualization not as representation of place, but as a foundational act through which places are brought into being. Focusing on emerging Earth and space futures, it asks how meaning, orientation, and belonging are constructed when place is assembled rather than inherited through experience. The panel builds on recent IEEE VIS discussions and extends them toward a question not yet addressed in visualization research, visualization as a founding act of placemaking in the absence of lived experience.

Presentations in this session