Trained as a computer scientist and visual artist, I use design to create artifacts that empower marginalized individuals and communities while advancing scholarly conversations about the technical and ethical aspects of building interactive systems.
Accessible Data Visualization
I partner with blind collaborators and study participants to co-design novel interfaces for non-visual data exploration.
These interfaces support the autonomy and agency of blind users to conduct self-guided data analysis and help them establish common ground with sighted users with shared spatial data metaphors.
2022 (forthcoming). Olli: An Extensible Visualization Library for Screen Reader Accessibility. Matt Blanco, Jonathan Zong, Arvind Satyanarayan. IEEE VIS Posters.
Design for Assistive Technology, MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute
Interactive Visualization Tools and Abstractions
I design languages and interfaces that allow users to move between static, interactive, and animated data representations, and engage in real-time collaboration.
These tools help users rapidly conduct data exploration using a broad set of spatial and temporal visualization techniques.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Publications
2022 (forthcoming). Animated Vega-Lite: Unifying Animation with a Grammar of Interactive Graphics. Jonathan Zong*, Josh Pollock*, Dylan Wootton, Arvind Satyanarayan. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS).
2020. Layered Abstractions for Interactive Visualization Design. Digital Structures Group, MIT Department of Architecture.
Systems and Frameworks for Data Consent and Refusal
I design software that protects the autonomy of research participants online, and develop frameworks to support designers and activists in refusing large-scale data collection by powerful actors.
Bringing together methods from design, empirical social science, and feminist moral philosophy, I develop ideas about consent and refusal by putting theory in conversation with practices that matter to people’s lives.
2020. Collective Refusal and the Limits of Informed Consent for Data Protection. Jonathan Zong, J. Nathan Matias. Data & Society Contested Data Workshop.
2019. The Struggle to Democratize MIT. Rodrigo Ochigame, Alan Lundgard, Alonso Espinosa Dominguez, Jonathan Zong, Gabrielle Ballard, Sally Haslanger, Edmund Bertschinger, Mani Mengiste, Ruth Perry. The Tech (MIT).
As a visual artist and critical computing scholar-practitioner, I explore the possibility of combining art and computation to open up space for contingency, embodied knowledge, and exploring speculation as a mode of intervention.
My work often starts from the body as a contested site of control, exploring the way people are asked to conform their bodies to oppressive systems.