This talk presents recent work on how data visualisation can help people understand and communicate data. Data visualisation—the visual representation of data for external cognition—can be extremely powerful in providing overviews and revealing new perspectives on otherwise abstract and invisible data, and phenomena such as networks, geography, temporalities and multi-dimensional relationships.

Drawing on examples of collaborative work on data comics, dashboards, visualisation atlases as multifaceted visualisation platforms and visualisation badges in the context of climate action and supporting peace building, this talk asks how such visualisation can be used more broadly, made accessible to everyone, and support collaboration across domains.

The talk eventually asks to what extent visualisations can be used in public and political decision-making, what are the challenges to data-driven decision making, and how these processes can be supported through the visualisation of evidence and collaborative platforms.