  During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to
inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of
information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this
process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over
time. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among
dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream
news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used)
COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how did visualization
creators engage in COVID-19 dashboard design, and what tensions, conflicts, and
challenges arose during this process? Our findings detail the trajectory of
design practices -- from creation to expansion, maintenance, and termination --
that are shaped by the complex interplay between design goals, tools and
technologies, labor, emerging crisis contexts, and public engagement. We
particularly examined the tensions between designers and the general public
involved in these processes. These conflicts, which often materialized due to a
divergence between public demands and standing policies, centered around the
type and amount of information to be visualized, how public perceptions shape
and are shaped by visualization design, and the strategies utilized to deal
with (potential) misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations. Our findings
and lessons learned shed light on new ways of thinking in visualization design,
focusing on the bundled activities that are invariably involved in human and
nonhuman participation throughout the entire trajectory of design practice.
