It’s expensive (in terms of effort) to design for multiple screens, but often necessary. Responsive design isn’t something that can be transparently solved by technology because it’s a design problem to decide what you want to show on different screens. That said, once you’ve made those decisions, technology can make them easier to implement.

(For example, see ai2html for a simple workflow used by The New York Times to create static graphics at various resolutions: http://ai2html.org/)

For most #content today, it’s probably best to design for mobile first and then think about an enhanced (or “optimized”) display for desktop later. But there are plenty of visualization applications, such as systems monitoring, where you might want to design first (or even only) for a large desktop display.

It’s a lot easier to have rich interactive displays on desktop. Our tiny phones are powerful computers, but there’s only so much you can squeeze out of a tiny display that gets occluded by our fat, meatstick fingers. ;)