Three days in May have proven a successful combination: one day Symbol'26, two days of IIID VisionPlus'26 conferences.

Just looking at the pictures brings a big smile to our faces - see for yourself here!

Quite apart from gripping presentations and being inspired by new ideas, the VisionPlus conferences are always about connecting with people. There is a magic and comfort in a global community that shares the vision of a positive impact with clear, understandable, beautiful information.

The crowning glory of our days together was the IIID Award ceremony with many new kids on the block among the winners.

We have prepared the full conference video playlist for you below

Emily Allbon and Rachel Warner

'Ways to effectively communicate the process of making a police complaint in the UK’
Rachel Warner and Emily Allbon share how they used flowcharts to help the public understand the often confusing UK police complaints process. Working with civil liberties organisation Liberty, they explore how process-specific terms like "logged," "recorded," and "investigated" can confuse and frustrate complainants — and how information design can give people more clarity and agency when facing administrative systems. A look at how flowcharts can serve both as a thinking tool for designers and a communication tool for citizens navigating difficult, high-stakes processes.

Paula Martin Rivero

‘Designing Accountability: The Frontex Complaints Mechanism as an Information Design System’
Paula Martin Rivero examines the Frontex complaints mechanism as a designed information system, analyzing the language, structure, and submission flow of its public-facing forms and digital interface. The talk explores how design choices around clarity, discoverability, and required documentation shape who can participate and how responsibility is distributed — and where complexity creates hesitation or exclusion. Drawing on artistic research methods like annotation and visual re-framing, the talk uses annotated screenshots and interface diagrams to surface hidden assumptions in civic administrative systems, offering designers tools to critically engage with the systems they build.

Liuhuaying Yang

‘Transliteration as a shared administrative compromise’
Liuhuaying Yang explores transliteration — using Chinese pinyin names as a case study — as a systemic compromise made for cross-border legibility, not just a technical failure. The talk shows how compressing thousands of Chinese characters into a few hundred pinyin syllables strips away individuality, disambiguation, and gender cues, with real consequences for passports, records, and academic databases. Featuring two interactive tools built on a dataset of 1.2 billion Chinese names, Not My Name and Not My Gender, the talk reveals how much identity information is lost in transliteration and invites reflection on more responsible systems of representation.

Juan Carlos de Jesús Ramírez González

‘Documents that mediate care’
Juan Carlos de Jesus Ramirez Gonzalez presents a benchmarking study of information materials given to breast cancer patients in Mexican public hospitals, examining whether these documents actually help patients understand and act on critical health information. Combining expert analysis of legibility and clarity with empirical evaluation from breast cancer survivors, the talk explores how institutional health communication can support — or hinder — meaningful patient engagement. The work points toward heuristics for a more empathetic, interaction-focused model of information visualization in healthcare.

Peter Stoyko

‘SIGILS for Civic Infrastructure Explainability’
Peter Stoyko introduces SIGILS (Systems Integrated Graphical-notation and Icon Library Scheme), a new information-design tool for making opaque civic data systems understandable — even self-explaining. Part of the award-winning SystemViz Project, SIGILS combines a rigorous new graphical notation with a subject-specific icon library, starting with data architecture in civic institutions. The talk covers the research behind the notation, the design of the icon library, and a gallery of real-world examples applying SIGILS to civic infrastructure.

Purba Joshi & Mandar Rane

'Food Packaging at the Intersection of Regu-lation, Commerce, and Consumer Decisions'
Joshi Purba and Mandar Rane examine the gap between regulatory intent and consumer understanding in Indian food packaging, using biscuit packs as a case study. While FSSAI mandates dense, text-heavy labelling on the back for transparency, the front is shaped by persuasive marketing — and the study finds little meaningful connection between the two in helping consumers understand what they're actually eating. The talk argues for design activism within regulatory frameworks, proposing simple front-of-pack visuals for key ingredients that reframe packaging as a civic interface where trust is built through design.

Purba Joshi & Mandar Rane

'Food Packaging at the Intersection of Regu-lation, Commerce, and Consumer Decisions'
Joshi Purba and Mandar Rane examine the gap between regulatory intent and consumer understanding in Indian food packaging, using biscuit packs as a case study. While FSSAI mandates dense, text-heavy labelling on the back for transparency, the front is shaped by persuasive marketing — and the study finds little meaningful connection between the two in helping consumers understand what they're actually eating. The talk argues for design activism within regulatory frameworks, proposing simple front-of-pack visuals for key ingredients that reframe packaging as a civic interface where trust is built through design.

Sakshi Patel

‘Human-centered redesign of antenatal care’
Sakshi Patel presents a human-centered redesign of paper-based antenatal care tracking forms used by frontline health workers in rural India. Through observation and activity analysis with ASHA workers and Auxiliary Nurse Midwives, the study uncovered fragmented information, poor navigation, and heavy reliance on memory in existing documents — and developed a redesigned, month-wise form with clearer visual hierarchy and counselling-friendly language. The work shows how significant improvements in maternal health documentation can come purely from information design, without new technology, strengthening transparency and trust between health workers and pregnant women.

Sakshi Patel

‘Human-centered redesign of antenatal care’
Sakshi Patel presents a human-centered redesign of paper-based antenatal care tracking forms used by frontline health workers in rural India. Through observation and activity analysis with ASHA workers and Auxiliary Nurse Midwives, the study uncovered fragmented information, poor navigation, and heavy reliance on memory in existing documents — and developed a redesigned, month-wise form with clearer visual hierarchy and counselling-friendly language. The work shows how significant improvements in maternal health documentation can come purely from information design, without new technology, strengthening transparency and trust between health workers and pregnant women.

Raman Khanna & Nathaniel Rayestu

‘Information Design as a change facilitator: Think Policy + the Ashoka Cisco Cohort’
Raman Khanna and Nathaniel Rayestu explore how information design can turn voter apathy into meaningful civic participation, drawing on Think Policy's civic tech platform Bijak Memantau in Indonesia. The talk examines work done within the Ashoka Cisco Cohort to scale citizen-policymaker dialogue, using Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory to show how cultural power distance shapes tech adoption and citizen agency. Connecting directly to VisionPlus 2026's "Trust" theme, the session shows how strategic information design can build trust across citizen networks and multiply systemic impact.

Chad Hall

‘Designing a Scalable Visualization System for an Informed Public’
Chad Hall presents a scalable data visualization design system built for USAFacts, a non-partisan nonprofit recognized as one of the least politically biased media sources, in collaboration with design consultancy Artefact. The system codifies principles of neutrality, recognizability, and accessibility — from AA-compliant color palettes to typographic hierarchy and signature visual markers — enabling teams across web, social, and Congressional reports to consistently produce trustworthy visualizations at scale. The talk offers a model for building civic infrastructure that resists misinformation and supports an informed democratic public.

Aureliano Capri

‘Which language for shared administration?’
Aureliano Capri presents a practice-based case study on using information and legal design to support "shared administration" — a collaborative model of public action being adopted in Italian public administration. The talk traces the collaboration between an information designer and a policy advisor in a large Italian municipality, using synoptic tables, visual facilitation, and diagrams to frame, advocate for, and co-design new participatory processes between citizens and local government. It offers insights for designers looking to support policy advisors navigating similar organisational change, and asks whether the local scale is best suited for measurable short-term impact.

Heike Nehl

‘Information Design for the new Entry Exit System by the European Union’
Heike Nehl examines how the EU's new Entry/Exit System — a biometric border-control process for non-EU travelers rolling out fully by April 2026 — is being communicated to millions of passengers at European airports. Drawing on her wayfinding and passenger-information experience, she analyzes message clarity, signage placement, and traveller behaviour to assess how well symbols, visuals, and text convey this major procedural shift. The talk also looks at the challenge of coordinating visual communication across the EU, national police, and airports to keep passenger flow smooth, safe, and welcoming.

Lotje van den Burg

‘How people may find their way in 2035’
Lotje van den Burg presents a speculative case study from her TU Delft graduation project, developed with wayfinding studio Mijksenaar, exploring how people might navigate spaces like the Louvre in 2035. Using nine future-oriented wayfinding typologies, the talk reframes wayfinding as civic infrastructure — a network of cues, narratives, and institutional values that shape behaviour, not just signage. It raises pressing questions about when clarity empowers citizens versus subtly steering them, how adaptive systems risk exclusion or surveillance, and what responsibility designers hold when their work mediates power between institutions and the public.

Ritik Shah

‘The Indian metro systems as a form of civic communication’
Ritik Shah examines wayfinding across nine Indian metro systems — including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata — as a form of civic communication shaped by India's multilingual landscape. With no standardised guidelines, each network has developed its own approach to displaying English, Hindi, and regional languages across multiple scripts, leading to varying levels of clarity and consistency. The talk shows how typographic and hierarchy choices can privilege some language communities while obscuring information for others, offering designers practical tools for analysing multiscript transport signage beyond surface aesthetics.

27 May 2026: Symbol’26
Neurath@90, A Case for International Picture Language

Geanina Turcanu

‘Un-rigging Environmental Justice UX Ecosystems’
Geanina Turcanu audits the accessibility of environmental justice UX through a Neurathian, Isotype-driven lens, arguing that rights like information access and public participation are too often treated as static entitlements rather than usable, functional tools. Focusing on the Aarhus Convention's three key pillars, the talk proposes restructuring text-heavy government portals into WCAG-compliant "Integrated Justice Hubs" using intuitive visual language. The goal: shifting environmental justice from a reactive model, where citizens must fight for access, to a proactive one where access is the default.

Barbara Weingartshofer

‘The Gender Gap in Design'
Barbara Weingartshofer unpacks the income gap between female and male designers in Austria, using isotype-inspired data visualizations published as a brochure with designaustria. The talk shows how Isotype can turn data many designers tend to avoid into something engaging and motivating, revealing real differences in employment structures, turnover, and hourly rates across the industry. Weingartshofer also hopes to spark cross-country comparison, inviting the international design community to share how this gap plays out elsewhere.

David Sless

‘If there is no before, there is no after!’
Since 1985, David Sless and the Communication Research Institute have pioneered methods for quantifying how information design changes actually perform, comparing outcomes before and after redesign. Drawing on decades of published research and projects for government and business, the talk shares some of the most important and surprising findings from applying rigorous before-and-after evaluation to real-world design work.

Arun Ganesh

‘Open source volunteer-driven mapping to fix information asymmetry’
Arun Ganesh presents Amche Atlas (amche.in), an open-source, volunteer-driven mapping project working to make Goa's complex land-use masterplan accessible to the public. Using crowdsourced data and AI-assisted development, the project tackles the information asymmetry created when detailed spatial plans — governing land use down to individual parcels — are published in formats too costly or inaccessible for ordinary citizens to use. The talk shows how open-source tools and collective citizen effort can democratize access to geographic information, with implications far beyond Goa.

Selina Steiner and Maja Riegler

‘Designing a Cantonal Health Dashboard’
Selina Steiner and Maja Riegler present a design-led case study on building a prototype health dashboard for a Swiss canton, developed through a participatory process with health administrators, policy-makers, and domain experts. Focusing on population structure, primary care provision, and patient flows, the dashboard uses maps, time series, and flow diagrams to reveal patterns previously hidden in fragmented, tabular data. The project shows how visualization design can shift institutional thinking, turning data from a static reporting layer into a shared analytical space that supports institutional learning.

Stefan Egger

‘Notes, Laws, and the lens of knowledge’
Stefan Egger traces how a nearly forgotten 2013 ministerial note and a 2015 Austrian Supreme Court ruling opened the door to redesigning road signs across the Austrian Autobahn network. Drawing on international symbol standardisation (ISO 7010), the talk shows how these overlooked legal precedents were used to challenge assumptions about what road sign designs are legally binding, ultimately improving the perceptibility of LED variable message signs. It's a case study in how obscure civic and legal processes can be leveraged to drive real safety improvements in Austrian road tunnels.

Chiara Fioravanti

'Testing visual simplified administrative texts with diverse users’
Chiara Fioravanti shares insights from user-testing visual, simplified administrative texts designed for migrants in Italy, developed under EU-funded AMIF projects to explain procedures and access to public services. Testing across immigration offices and language schools with diverse migrant participants revealed how language and cultural barriers shape comprehension, and highlighted the value of cultural mediators and teachers as facilitators in the testing process. The talk argues for sharing these findings with civil servants, so understanding the needs of "extreme users" can drive more accessible communication for everyone.

Robin Coenen

'What Can GovTech Learn from CivicTech? Bottom-Up Practices and Visual Strategies’
Robin Coenen explores what government technology can learn from bottom-up CivicTech practices, drawing on two projects from his design practice Visual Intelligence: Critical Mapping in Municipalist Movements, which documents evictions and housing conditions, and We Want Them Back, a platform supporting repatriation of human remains from colonial contexts. Both projects work with incomplete, uncertain data by prioritizing transparency and process over polished final outputs. The talk offers concrete takeaways for GovTech practitioners on designing with contested data, making uncertainty legible, and using prototypes to build institutional trust.

Bhairavi Balasubramanian

‘Policy ambiguities — a wicked governing tool’
Bhairavi Balasubramanian argues that policy ambiguity, paired with weak information flows, functions as a quiet governing tool that disciplines marginalised communities while maintaining an appearance of inclusion. Grounded in a case study on the Mahua forest-produce ecosystem in central India, the talk traces how Adivasi communities often self-restrict lawful actions due to unclear, poorly disseminated forest, excise, and development policies. Using systems mapping and qualitative research, it reframes this breakdown not as implementation failure but as opacity functioning as civic infrastructure — one designers play an active role in shaping.

Martin Foessleitner

‘Albert Camus and Information Design’
Martin Foessleitner applies Camus's philosophy of absurdism to information design, exploring how designers can create human-centric meaning and clarity even when working with complex, ambiguous, or overwhelming data. Drawing on The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus, the talk argues that good design should guide users through complexity without promising a false, complete understanding — instead embracing ambiguity as an honest reflection of the world. A philosophical, unexpected lens on civic administration and the designer's role within it.

28 and 29 May 2026: VisionPlus’26
Information design and civic administration: trust, tradition and toxicity

The “VisionPlus” conference series is an international, interdisciplinary forum for information design. In 2026, it was held in combination with The Symbol Group conference.

More about previous VisionPlus conferences on the IIID Website.

VisionPlus Conference is an initiative of the International Institute for Information Design (IIID).