Affective visualization is increasingly studied in visualization research, yet how designers bring emotions into their visualization work remains unexplored. This paper addresses this gap through semi-structured interviews with 15 visualization practitioners. Using hybrid thematic analysis, we identify: (1) three functions that emotions can serve for viewers (entry, engagement, outcome); (2) three facets of how designers work with emotion (data, design, audience), along with design strategies; and (3) ethical considerations in the design process. We also observe that affective intent often emerges during the design process rather than being planned from the outset, and that emotional impact arises from accumulated design choices rather than isolated visual elements. Finally, we highlight evaluation as a key challenge identified by our participants.
Visualizations can help audiences understand the scale of tragedies, such as the consequences of natural disasters, war, genocide, and pandemics. In these cases, a visualization designer's default behavior may be to focus on communicating quantitative information: numbers, statis…
When domain experts create charts, the bottleneck is rarely the data, but knowing the optimal next step in chart design. The visualization design space is vast, and while domain experts can recognize a good design when they see it, it is often challenging to determine the exact p…
Affect-adaptive systems increasingly act as communicators that sense a user's emotion and respond with events meant to change it, closing an affective loop. This vision assumes both that a machine's affective messages are received and that the bodily channel it monitors carries a…
Large language model personas are increasingly used to approximate diverse users during early-stage visualization design, but it remains unclear whether persona-conditioned outputs reflect stable personality effects or artifacts of model choice and task framing. We examine this q…
Digital objects express emotions through different modalities. For example, a movie may include visual scenes, audio, dialogue, and facial expressions, while a song may contain melody, rhythm, lyrics, and vocal tone. Because existing emotion recognition models are usually modalit…
User experience (UX) designers face barriers when creating data visualizations due to limited domain expertise in visualization or unfamiliarity with specialized tools. This highlights a clear need for effective methods to build visualization literacy. To address this, we evaluat…