Information Design Journal - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2025

This paper examines participatory data physicalization as a mode of public engagement. Building on the shift from the Quantified Self to a Quantified Us, the study investigates how data can enable shared meaning-making and intercultural dialogue beyond individual reflection. Culture is understood here as encompassing identity differences, knowledge perspectives, symbolic associations, and lived contexts of interpretation.

Using a Research through Design methodology, nine wellness-focused installations deployed in university campus public spaces revealed five recurring design dimensions: material affordances and metaphors, participation framing, interpretive flexibility and situated meaning, peer visibility and intercultural encounter, and publicness as cultural care.

Findings show that participatory data physicalization can serve as civic infrastructure, where data is not only represented but also co-authored, negotiated, and encountered as a living communal resource. Shared concerns around identity, community, and emotion foster resonance across differences while sustaining plurality and ambiguity. This work contributes to the cultural turn in information design by positioning participatory data engagement as a practice of recognition, solidarity, and civic connection.

This article examines how grassroots menstrual health advocates re-author global communication templates into culturally resonant designs. Drawing on multimodal artifacts and interviews from South Asia, East Africa, and Latin America, I examine typography, color, layout, iconography, and infrastructural strategies as rhetorical resources that redistribute authority, create emotional safety, and sustain circulation under fragile conditions. From this analysis, I propose the Culturally Responsive Information Design (CRID) framework: community epistemic authority, responsive design adaptation, infrastructural responsiveness, and decolonized translation processes. CRID advances the cultural turn in information design and offers guidance for UX, technical communication, and public health scholars and practitioners.

This study employs a critical information design lens to interrogate whose knowledge is represented and whose voices are excluded in public transport systems. Focusing on migrant workers in Dubai, UAE, it foregrounds issues of equity, representation, and participation in the design of mobility-related information. Drawing on field observations and a participatory workshop with eleven participants, the research brings forward overlooked narratives of navigating buses, metro, and water transport. The findings demonstrate how critical information design can amplify marginalized voices, foster inclusion, and reimagine transport information infrastructures as socially responsive and contextually grounded — moving beyond a narrow focus on clarity and efficiency.

This paper details the process of indigenizing an Arizona water chatbot. Initial attempts to integrate tribal data, adopt an Indigenous worldview, and apply the Two-Eyed Seeing framework were unsuccessful, leading to inappropriate outputs and potential harm. The turning point came when we reframed bias as evidence and our embodied reactions as data, enabling an epistemological reorientation toward relational sense-making. We argue that, to serve Indigenous communities effectively, information design must address these fundamental epistemological conflicts. Our work offers a model for creating more attuned, decolonial AI chatbot interfaces that have wide-reaching potential.