Jason Dykes and Miriah Meyer of the Visualization Design Lab, University of Utah, presented their 'rigor' paper at IEEE VIS in Vancouver. The paper intends to move visualization design researchers away from the kinds of system related findings and process orientated validation approach that are typical of design studies and towards ways of developing subjective knowledge constructs from applied visualization design contexts.

The paper frames visualization design study through an interpretivist perspective and aims to give design study researchers criteria that support subjective, reflexive, constructive activity. The paper also taps in to the 'design as research' and 'artefact as knowledge' strands of design (research) to frame the kinds of creative design and thinking that we do in visualization. It intends to give visualization researchers who design in applied contexts confidence in developing and presenting knowledge constructs relating to their experiences and observations of people using visualization to explore data.

Check out the 10-page IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics paper, or watch the 12 minute IEEE VIS presentation to find out how design study research may benefit from explicitly considering six criteria: INFORMED; ABUNDANT; REFLEXIVE; PLAUSIBLE; RESONANT; TRANSPARENT