About

We are a team of visualization researchers at Graz University of Technology and the University of Utah. Our interests include the process of designing and developing visualizations, visualization for biology, visualization frameworks, and, more generally, visualization of big, heterogeneous, and complex datasets.

VDL is part of the Institute of Human-Centred Computing (HCC) at Graz University of Technology. VDL started at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the School of Computing at the University of Utah and remains affiliated with both.

Blog And News

Blog Post: Beyond the Demo: Building Visualization Research Software That Lasts 17 Jul 2026
Over the last 15 years, I have been involved in numerous projects that aimed to build visualization research software – not just as demonstrations for papers, but as systems that could be sustained, adopted, and used beyond their original research context. Some of these efforts failed; others achieved tentative forms of success. In this post, I will reflect on what worked, what did not, and what I learned from both. I will discuss different ways visualization research software can succeed: by advancing an idea even when the lasting contribution is the idea rather than the artifact, by turning a prototype into a commercial product, or by growing a project into community-focused open-source infrastructure. Drawing on these experiences, I will offer practical guidelines for researchers who want to build software that survives beyond the initial publication.

Selfie by the reVISit team on stage at IEEE VIS in Vienna after receiving the award.
More...
Blog Post: ReVISit 2 Paper Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE VIS 10 Nov 2025
We’re happy to share that our paper on ReVISit 2 received a Best Paper Award at IEEE VIS 2025. ReVISit 2 is an open framework for designing, deploying, and disseminating browser-based visualization studies across the full experiment life cycle. In this post, we summarize the contributions of the paper, describe the replication studies that demonstrate the system’s capabilities, reflect on feedback from users, and outline how reVISit can support more reproducible and expressive experimental research.

Selfie by the reVISit team on stage at IEEE VIS in Vienna after receiving the award.
More...
Blog Post: Learning with Hands: Making Complex Chart Types Accessible 8 Aug 2025
If you’ve ever struggled to read a complicated chart, imagine trying to understand it without ever seeing it at all. For blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, that’s not just a thought experiment—it’s a daily reality. Most of the time, BLV readers rely on alternative text (alt text) to access charts. Alt text works well for something simple, like a bar chart. But for more complex visualizations—think violin plots—it can be confusing. Without a mental model of the chart type, even the clearest description can seem abstract and incomplete. That’s where our research comes in. Here, we explored how 3D-printed tactile “template charts” can help BLV individuals learn chart types. Rather than aiming to represent a dataset, these templates help BLV individuals grasp the core concept of each chart type.

A photo of eight 3D-printed tactile charts from our design iteration. There are four chart types—UpSet plots, clustered heatmaps, violin plots, and faceted line charts—with two design variations for each type.
More...
News: VDL is Moving to Austria 30 Jul 2025
The lab is starting a new chapter, with Alex moving to TU Graz, Austria

A photo of the Clocktower in Graz, Austria.


After an incredible decade at the University of Utah, the Visualization Design Lab (VDL) is entering a new chapter: the lab is partially relocating to Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in Austria. This will be a gradual transition: only Alex will be moving, while the rest of the team remains in Utah. For the foreseeable future, the lab will operate across two continents.

VDL’s new home in Austria will be the Institute of Human-Centred Computing at TU Graz.

Alex will be hiring a PhD student and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Graz. Check out the positions page for details.

A Brief History of the Visualization Design Lab

The Visualization Design Lab was founded when Alex joined the University of Utah and teamed up with Miriah in 2015. From then until 2021, Miriah and Alex co-directed the lab, leading numerous projects and mentoring many students.

In 2021, Miriah moved to Linköping University in Sweden, where she founded the Visualization and Interaction Design Group.

In 2025, Alex returned to his alma mater in Graz to continue VDL’s research mission at TU Graz.

This website will reflect the new phase of the lab in Austria, while continuing to preserve the history, people, and publications from the Utah chapter. For archival purposes, the final version of the Utah VDL site will remain available at
https://vdl.sci.utah.edu.

More...
See All News

Recent Publications