Amid volunteer preparation ramping up for Outlier 2025 next month in Miami (and the increase in my Slack messages and task list), I wanted to ground myself with the memories of last year’s conference and remind myself why I love this space.

The Outlier 2024 talks left me with more questions than answers for how I want to design my life and my practice in data viz. Many of these questions I still sit with, particularly as I examine which teams and organizations I’d like to grow with.

• How might I not assume data visualizations as the default in creating an experience of data?

• In creating a data experience, how am I myself transformed in the process? As I continue reminding myself that data is relational to the journey around it, how am I acknowledging that data visualizations are also made of many constructs?

• How might we have different layers of alt text, not assuming a one-size-fits-all approach? What room for creativity might there be within the constraints of the medium through which we interact with an encoding of data?

Another experience I loved last year was designing some data physicalization activities for each day of the conference. Creating data physicalizations naturally requires some acquaintance with their physical space, so I didn’t know exactly what form these activities would take until the day before the conference. That reflects a bit in the technical construction (or lack of) in the physicalizations, but it was fun to see the layers in which conference attendees responded or broke or added to the physicalizations.

I ended up making a couple of physicalizations after Outlier in community spaces and writing a research proposal about materiality and accessibility in physicalizations for a grad school application I never submitted. But, I know I’m still at the very beginning of my journey in thinking more expansively in encoding data and I’m excited for what’s to come.

This will be my fifth year attending Outlier as a volunteer in some capacity (whether as a DVS board member or now as a general volunteer). I love the space at this conference to wrestle through these questions aloud and all the chain reactions that it brings—from the ideas it bubbles to the people I meet.