Speculative Visualization : A New Rhetoric for Communicating Public Concerns

Speculative design is an emerging rhetorical strategy in design practices and research to raise public awareness in social agendas that have been little explored. As a stream of this type of research, we propose speculative visualization that aims to achieve speculative design by utilizing techniques from data visualization and graphic design. Specifically, speculative visualization represents socially and politically meaningful data in aesthetic ways to provoke viewers’ interpretation and further elicit discussions. In this paper, we report the diverse approaches of speculative visualization by demonstrating three exemplary studies and identifying their visual rhetoric. Based on the argument, we discuss research opportunities that speculative visualization can broaden its design sphere: the aesthetic adaptation of data visualization techniques, the methodologies of assessment, and the public’s engagement in design activities.