Başak Oral

I am a last year PhD candidate in the Visualization and Graphics group at Utrecht University supervised by Dr. Evanthia Dimara and Prof. Alexandru Telea.

I am Başak and prefer to be addressed with she/her pronouns.

I study how interactive visualization tools can support complex decision making – decisions involving uncertainty, multiple criteria, constraints, and personal or social context. I combine empirical visualization research, interactive tool design, interviews, and quantitative and qualitative analysis. Working with real decision makers has increasingly drawn me to questions of power in data and design: whose experiences become data at all, who defines what a system shows, and who carries the consequences of those choices. My recent work draws on data feminism and situated knowledge to combine official indicators with community-contributed lived experiences, treating marginalized people as decision makers rather than data points.