'License to VIT’ - A Design Taxonomy for Visual Inquiry Tools

Abstract

Visual Inquiry Tools are valuable assets to work conjointly on an ill-structured or wicked problem and solve it creatively. With visual inquiry tools, designers can sketch the problem-space of an artifact-to-be-designed and generate solutions in a priori defined ontological elements. While there exists guidance in how visual inquiry tools should be designed content-wise, there is a lack of clarification on the design options available to design them. Subsequently, the paper proposes a taxonomy of visual inquiry tools outlining options for their design. We do this by incorporating a sample of 24 visual inquiry tools developed in the scientific literature corpus as well as 15 through empirical examples