Curran Kelleher, I hope it’s silly, I really do.

My concern is short- or medium-term, for the people making a living doing visualization — for practitioners. It’s nice that academics are doing research and holding conferences. It’s nice that artists will play around with data. It’s nice that some tools have become standardized.

But what are people employed to make visualizations being paid to do?

Are they making line and bar charts in dashboards? (Furthering “UI/UX” swallowing the rest of design.) Or are they doing something more interesting?

If it’s very conservative dashboards, why is that? And is there anything to do about it? That’s the question.