Beyond the X-Y Axis: Building a Vernacular Data Language for the Next Billion Users

While my talk focuses on a pedagogical post-mortem of teaching data-logic, this dialogue serves as an independent, participatory forum to solve a recurring industry tension. If the standard Cartesian plane is a learned language that many Indian users have not had the opportunity to read, we must ask what alternative visual metaphors, symbols, or storytelling structures can make data intuitive for everyone. This conversation is critical today as we build Digital Public Infrastructure and public dashboards that are technically accurate but often cognitively inaccessible to the very citizens they are meant to serve. This session shifts the focus from big data to big understanding, asking how we can design for high-context cultures where abstract geometry often fails. This dialogue extends the conversation from the classroom into the real world of practitioners, researchers, and journalists. In the global data visualisation community, best practices are often synonymous with Western minimalist aesthetics. However, in the Indian context, graphicacy - the ability to decode graphs is the silent barrier to data equity. This session invites the community to move beyond the expert-driven dashboard metaphor and explore cognitive accessibility. We will discuss why a Sankey diagram might feel alien to a user who understands a river flow metaphor perfectly, or why a percentage fails where frequency framing succeeds. The session is designed as a structured experience exchange and pattern-mining exercise. I will open with one specific failure of graphicacy from the field to set the stage for vulnerability and shared discovery. Participants will then be invited to share their own war stories where a perfect visualisation failed to land with a local audience. We will deconstruct these to identify recurring cognitive barriers. In small breakout groups, participants will be tasked with an analog challenge to brainstorm a vernacular way to represent a complex data point, such as local air quality or inflation, without using a standard chart. Finally, we will reconvene to map out the common visual archetypes that emerged, identifying symbols or scales that feel inherently Indian. This dialogue is for anyone building for the Indian public who has felt the friction between global design standards and local cognitive styles. Participants will walk away with a shared library of failures and a collective toolkit of social scaling analogies, which are practical ways to translate abstract numbers into physical, relatable benchmarks. By the end of the session, we aim to have a rough roadmap for a vernacular data language that leverages India’s symbolic and oral traditions. While the talk provides the pedagogical foundation, this dialogue offers a space for the community to actively experiment with cognitive empathy, ensuring that our data is as readable as it is accurate.