About us

The people behind the deck

VisDeck is a teaching tool built by researchers who teach information visualization, for the students who take it.

The project

A card deck for teaching visualization design

VisDeck grew out of a recurring problem in teaching information visualization: students learn to name charts long before they learn to design one. Asked to visualize a dataset, they reach for a chart type they recognise and work backwards. The reasoning that should come first — what question am I answering, what kind of data do I have, what will each mark represent — never gets said out loud.

The deck turns that reasoning into something you can hold. Each card is one design decision, and cards connect through a port-and-symbol system printed on their edges, so an assembly that doesn't hold together is visible on the table before anything is plotted. The result is a design a student can build, explain, and defend.

VisDeck is developed for the Information Visualization course at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, and is funded by IST through its Pedagogical Innovation Projects programme, which supports teaching staff in developing and trialling new approaches in the classroom.

Instituto Superior Técnico
Instituto Superior Técnico
Universidade de Lisboa
PIP 1018P.07004
The team

Who makes VisDeck

A small group working on information visualization and human–computer interaction, between INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, and Iscte.

Daniel Gonçalves
Designer

Daniel Gonçalves

Full Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico · INESC-ID

Daniel designed VisDeck: the card taxonomy, the port grammar that decides which cards fit together, and the rules of play (with some AI-help for brainstorming and script generation). He is a Full Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Instituto Superior Técnico and an integrated researcher in the Graphics and Interaction area at INESC-ID, working on information visualization, gamification, human–computer interaction, and personal information management. He teaches the Information Visualization course the deck was built for.

INESC-ID profile ↗
Sandra Gama
Collaborator

Sandra Gama

Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico · INESC-ID

Professor in the Computer Engineering Department at Instituto Superior Técnico and Head of the HUMAN Lab in INESC-ID's Graphics and Interaction group, where she studies human factors in HCI, information visualization, and brain–computer interfaces. Her extensive knowledge of invovis after over a decade of teaching that course helped inform the design of the deck.

sandragama.eu ↗
João Moreira
Collaborator

João Moreira

Researcher, INESC-ID

Professor at Universidade Lusófona, Researcher at INOV-Labs and Integrated Researcher with the Graphics and Interaction group at INESC-ID, working on information visualization, incidental visualizations, and user studies. His research into how people read visualizations in passing feeds directly into the deck's play.

INESC-ID profile ↗
Tomás Alves
Collaborator

Tomás Alves

Assistant Researcher, Iscte — University Institute of Lisbon

Assistant Researcher at Iscte's Business Research Unit and co-coordinator of visualization at the DAViD Lab. He studies how individual differences and cognitive biases shape the way people read and act on visualizations — the trade-offs the deck's warning cards ask students to justify.

Ciência-Iscte profile ↗

Get in touch

Questions about the deck, using it in your own course, or the research behind it? Write to Daniel.

e-mail address
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