Rice University’s Program in Writing and Communication hosted the fifth iteration of the Visual Communication Symposium at the Moody Center for the Arts last month.
The symposium, VCS 2025: Complex Data, Simple Visual Stories, discussed the latest trends in visualizing and exploring complex data, including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Through speaker sessions, hands-on workshops and networking opportunities, attendees gained actionable strategies to apply to their own data visualization. The symposium is designed for researchers, students and professionals who want to elevate their data storytelling skills through visualization.
To learn more about the impact of VCS, Rice News caught up with Jennifer Wilson, director of the Program in Writing and Communication:
What is the overall goal of the Visual Communications Symposium?
There is much emphasis in higher education on teaching people to communicate in written and oral modes, but there are few sources on university campuses to help people learn to communicate effectively using visuals. Researchers are often left on their own to figure out best practices, so they simply copy chart types, color schemes and layouts they’ve seen others use. As a result, practices proliferate that actually impede visual understanding instead of enhancing it. Additionally, commonly available visual communication resources often focus on nonacademic settings or on data presentation instead of data exploration. With these limitations in mind, we founded VCS in 2019 as a way to bring top researchers and practitioners of visual communication, particularly visualization of academic data, to the Rice campus.
Was there a specific angle to this year’s event compared to previous years?
This year’s theme revolved around exploring and communicating about complicated data sets in comprehensible ways. We also realized it was important to learn a bit about what was happening with GenAI in data viz. In comparison, the VCS 2023 theme was Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself, and we invited speakers who could talk about considering the human elements of data viz, like how humans perceive visuals and how to visualize data about human participants. While each iteration of VCS has had a specific theme, we always invite one or two speakers who can address a few basic aspects of visual communication.
What role did AI play in this symposium, and how important is it to address AI when it comes to visual communication?
It is incredibly important to be thinking about the role of GenAI in visual communication. As I mentioned, effective visualizations have to be created with the human brain in mind, so many of us in higher ed have questions right now like, “How effective might GenAI visualizations be?” and “What work is being done to improve GenAI visualization programs?” and “What unintended consequences might arise from using GenAI to create visuals?” We invited two speakers with expertise in GenAI this year, one with technical knowledge and one who researches the ethics of GenAI.
What was accomplished through the workshops?
The VCS workshops provide an opportunity for participants to apply some of the visualization tools they’ve been hearing about during the talks, refine their existing data viz skills and learn to use new tools or techniques they haven’t tried before.
What else would you like people to know about the Visual Comms Symposium?
We’re excited to host VCS 2027! If members of the Rice community have specific aspects of data visualization they’d like to see us address, please let me know.
To learn more, visit pwc.rice.edu/.