Visualization for Villainy
This addresses the problem of enabling harmful visualization for villains, which is an incremental extension of prior deceptive visualization work.
The paper tackles the problem of visualization's potential for harm by developing a design space for malicious visualization to serve villains, unifying deceptive visualization with novel data-driven harmful techniques like emotional spear phishing and unsafe data physicalization.
Visualization has long been seen as a dependable and trustworthy tool for carrying out analysis and communication tasks -- a view reinforced by the growing interest in applying it to socially positive ends. However, despite the benign light in which visualization is usually perceived, it carries the potential to do harm to people, places, concepts, and things. In this paper, we capitalize on this negative potential to serve an underrepresented (but technologically engaged) group: villains. To achieve these ends, we introduce a design space for this type of graphical violence, which allows us to unify prior work on deceptive visualization with novel data-driven dastardly deeds, such as emotional spear phishing and unsafe data physicalization. By charting this vile charting landscape, we open new doors to collaboration with terrifying domain experts, and hopefully, make the world just a bit worse.