Yvonne Jansen

In an age where data and their various representations proliferates many aspects of our professional and private lives, a new form of awareness and visual literacy is required to interpret, critically discuss and actively engage in activities around data representation. Research has found Physicalization to be a productive way to introduce people to activities around data collection, processing, and representation – be it to learn about the concepts of making abstract data graspable, or to learn about complex phenomena represented within the data. This full-day hands-on workshop will explore how designing and building Physicalizations can be a way to actively learn the principles of data representation. The aim of this workshop is to (1) discuss different learning scenarios in which Physicalization activities can be beneficial, (2) explore different approaches to introduce Physicalization activities to different learning audiences, and (3) to build a community interested in the pedagogy of Physicalization.

ABSTRACT Physical representations of data have existed for thousands of years. Yet it is now that advances in digital fabrication, actuated tangible interfaces, and shape-changing displays are spurring an emerging area of research that we call Data Physicalization. It aims to help people explore, understand, and communicate data using computer-supported physical data representations. We call these representations physicalizations, analogously to visualizations – their purely visual counterpart. In this article, we go beyond the focused research questions addressed so far by delineating the research area, synthesizing its open challenges, and laying out a research agenda.

Physical visualizations come in increasingly diverse forms, and are used in domains including art and entertainment, business analytics, and scientific research. However, creating physical visualizations requires laborious craftsmanship and demands expertise in both data visualization and digital fabrication. We present three case studies that illustrate limitations of current visualization fabrication workflows. We then present MakerVis, a prototype tool that integrates

The accessibility of infovis authoring tools to a wide audience has been identified as one of the major research challenges. A key task of the authoring process is the development of visual mappings. While the infovis community has long been deeply interested in finding effective visual mappings, comparatively little attention has been placed on how people construct visual mappings. In this paper we present the results of a study designed to shed light on how people spontaneously transform data into visual representations. We asked people to create, update and explain their own information visualizations using simple materials such as tangible building blocks. We learned that all participants, most of whom had no experience in visualization, were readily able to create and talk about their own visualizations. On the basis of our observations, we discuss the actions of our participants in the context of the development of their visual representations and their analytic activities. From this we suggest implications for tool design that can enable broader support for infovis authoring. 
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