The Curator's Dilemma

My team creates 9 variations of a chart in 15 minutes. All defensible. None of them are wrong or bad charts. My afternoon is spent staring at them, trying to figure out which one is actually good!

After decades of building data viz, the making part is easy and fast now. What's slow is the choosing. And most of us haven't developed the muscles for that yet. This dialogue is about that shift happening right now, from construction to curation. The much harder skill of selecting, refining and deciding from abundance rather than building from scratch.

You'll start by ranking five visualisations of the same dataset on a wall, dot stickers in hand, before anyone speaks. Then small groups dig into the why, using prompt cards to surface the criteria people use, often without knowing they use them.

Then comes the reveal: which charts were AI-generated, and which were human-made. Rankings can get revisited and our own biases can surface. The conversation in the dialogue can get honest about what craft actually means for us now.

The session closes with the room building a shared curator's checklist together. The practitioner questions you can ask the next time you're staring at a wall of plausible visualisation options.

You'll leave with that checklist, a sharper sense of your own evaluation instincts, and a clearer picture of where your defaults might be leading you astray.