How We Map Possibilities: Understanding Design Spaces for Visualization

Design spaces serve as conceptual frameworks that enable systematic exploration of possibilities and constraints for particular design problems. Despite growing recognition of their importance in visualization research, the community faces two main challenges: characterizing what constitute a design space, given the lack of consensus on its definition, and determining how to construct these spaces in the absence of established methodologies. To address the challenges, we first conducted a literature review of visualization design space research, identifying three distinct research threads. Focusing on the thread that views design spaces as multi-dimensional frameworks, we refined our corpus to 49 papers and developed a unified conceptualization of design spaces. Building on this foundation, we proposed a systematic approach to design space construction, synthesized from an analysis of practices spanning five phases: exploration, data collection, creation, evaluation, and communication.