Materializing data (original) (raw)

Materializing data: notes on collaboration and tangible interfaces with excerpts and additions

DAT Journal

The visualization of data elucidates trends and patterns in the phenomena that the data represents, and opens accessibility to understanding complicated human and natural processes represented by data sets. Research indicates that interacting with a visualization amplfies cognition and analysis. A single visualization may show only one facet of the data. To examine the data from multiple perspectives, engaged citizens need to be able to construct their own visualizations from a data set. Many tools for data visualization have responded to this need, allowing non-data experts to manipulate and gain insights into their data, but most of these tools are restricted to the computer screen, keyboard, and mouse. Cognition and analysis may be strengthened even more through embodied interaction with data, whether through data sculpture or haptic and tangible interfaces. We present here the rationale for the design of a tool that allows users to probe a data set, through interactions with gra...

Citizen Engagement through Tangible Data Representation

Foro de Educación, 2016

We begin with the premise that data literacy is a fundamental facet of citizen education in this information age, and that an engaged citizenry in a democracy not only requires access to data, but also the capacity to manipulate and examine the data from multiple perspectives. The visualization of data elucidates trends and patterns in the phenomena that the data represents, and opens accessibility to understanding complicated human and natural processes represented by data sets. Research indicates that interacting with a visualization amplifies cognition and analysis. A single visualization may show only one facet of the data. To examine the data from multiple perspectives, engaged citizens need to be able to construct their own visualizations from a data set. Many tools for data visualization have responded to this need, allowing non-data experts to manipulate and gain insights into their data, but most of these tools are restricted to the computer screen, keyboard, and mouse. Cog...

Citizen Engagement through Tangible Data Representation Participación ciudadana interactiva y recíproca a través de la representación tangible de datos

2016

We begin with the premise that data literacy is a fundamental facet of citizen education in this information age, and that an engaged citizenry in a democracy not only requires access to data, but also the capacity to manipulate and examine the data from multiple perspectives. The visualization of data elucidates trends and patterns in the phenomena that the data represents, and opens accessibility to understanding complicated human and natural processes represented by data sets. Research indicates that interacting with a visualization amplifies cognition and analysis. A single visualization may show only one facet of the data. To examine the data from multiple perspectives, engaged citizens need to be able to construct their own visualizations from a data set. Many tools for data visualization have responded to this need, allowing non-data experts to manipulate and gain insights into their data, but most of these tools are restricted to the computer screen, keyboard, and mouse. Cog...

A Tangible User Interface for Interactive Data Visualization

We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface (TUI) designed to interactively query a database. While much work has been done on TUI, showing that they encourage collaboration and positively enhance user experience, few tangible systems have been designed specifically for data analysis tasks. Our system combines a tabletop (non-digital) graspable user interface with a two-dimensional screen display; the user interrogates the data by placing tokens on or off the tabletop and the screen displays the results of the user's query. The objects are tagged using fiducial markers, which are identified with open-source ReacTIVision computer vision software, and the visualization code is written in Processing. We use radio station listenership demographic data for this prototype, but the system can be used to query any type of database.

Critical Journal - Information Visualisation made Physical: Communicating Data through Interactive Experience Design

“Information Visualisation” was originally conceived to help scientists and engineers to search and scrutinise patterns in vast amount of complex data. With the development of technology and other creative factors, this had led some researchers, artists, and designers to go beyond the pixels into uncharted territory of physicality. This critical journal is a personal study of my five-week studio project that explores and investigate the role of aesthetic experience in interpreting complex information, particularly data, into tangible outcomes. My critical journal begins with understanding historical and cognitive aspects of information visualisation and how physicality, with the help of materiality and experiential considerations, provides the audience a tangible connection between knowledge and experience in the real world. Subsequently, I will analyse academic writings of physical visualisation while using case studies of contemporary works to highlight valuable insight to facilitate with my studio project. These insights established three distinct stages to create physical visualisations; collecting data from a local site, designing data visualisations from collected datasets, and physicalising data visualisations with Saussure's theory as a conceptual framework. Works produced from this studio project not only prove its novelty, but also illustrates how contextually related experiences can motivate the creative process to evoke emotional understanding within users. Throughout this process, prominent subject matters were also highlighted to serve as a plausible project brief for my final year project.

Digital Data Visualization with Interactive and Virtual Reality Tools. Review of Current State of the Art and Proposal of a Model

Revista ICONO14 Revista científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías emergentes, 2018

Massive and open data constitute a burgeoning field of study in the current context. The evolution of technology is, in turn, increasing its degree of interactivity, configuring several scenarios of great complexity in which data is understood on the basis of our interaction with it at different levels. Technologies such as virtual reality or augmented reality present an emerging framework for visualizing, representing and understanding information. Moreover, new disciplines such as interaction design, human-computer interaction, and user experience are needed to optimally configure the representation and design of data interaction dynamics, so that they can be implemented in contexts such as education. This paper reviews the current state of interactive and immersive technology (including virtual reality and alternative reality games) and of open and massive data, to highlight potential projections and propose models of data representation based on factors such as storytelling or u...