We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Despite people’s significant role in generating data in cities, their involvement in data governance (DG) remains limited, failing to address the inherent complexity of DG and undermining their ’right to the city’. We propose a collaborative systems thinking approach as a scoping tool for co-design, enabling researchers and designers to involve people in co-creating an understanding of the systemic structures underpinning DG in cities and developing prototypes and solutions informed by these structures. Using causal loop diagrams, we facilitated the development of a conceptual model of DG. Participants, representing diverse perspectives, created individual causal loop diagrams that were merged into a collaborative causal loop diagram (C-CLD). This C-CLD was employed in an interactive workshop to identify intervention points and develop targeted solutions. Our findings demonstrate how C-CLDs can accommodate multiplicity, foster agonism, and enable participants to challenge political dimensions and existing systemic structures. Moreover, the engagement process revealed the complexity of DG in the city, as perceived by the collective of participants, resulting in three key submodules that highlight tensions between citizen sensitisation to data collection, the private sector’s role in fulfilling citizens’ needs, and the struggles faced by local governments. This work draws on and extends HCI research that engages with systems thinking ontologies, contributing to an HCI that includes the political, moves beyond solutionism, and advances social justice-oriented approaches.

Ambiguity is pervasive in the complex sensemaking domains of risk assessment and prediction but there remains little research on how to design visual analytics tools to accommodate it. We report on findings from a qualitative study based on a conceptual framework of sensemaking processes to investigate how both new visual analytics designs and existing tools, primarily data tables, support the cognitive work demanded in avalanche forecasting. While both systems yielded similar analytic outcomes we observed differences in ambiguous sensemaking and the analytic actions either afforded. Our findings challenge conventional visualization design guidance in both perceptual and interaction design, highlighting the need for data interfaces that encourage reflection, provoke alternative interpretations, and support the inherently ambiguous nature of sensemaking in this critical application. We review how different visual and interactive forms support or impede analytic processes and introduce "gisting" as a significant yet unexplored analytic action for visual analytics research. We conclude with design implications for enabling ambiguity in visual analytics tools to scaffold sensemaking in risk assessment.

To facilitate engaging and nuanced conversations around data, we contribute a touchless approach to interacting directly with visualization in remote presentations. We combine dynamic charts overlaid on a presenter’s webcam feed with continuous bimanual hand tracking, demonstrating interactions that highlight and manipulate chart elements appearing in the foreground. These interactions are simultaneously functional and deictic, and some allow for the addition of “rhetorical flourish”, or expressive movement used when speaking about quantities, categories, and time intervals. We evaluated our approach in two studies with professionals who routinely deliver and attend presentations about data. The first study considered the presenter perspective, where 12 participants delivered presentations to a remote audience using a presentation environment incorporating our approach. The second study considered the audience experience of 17 participants who attended presentations supported by our environment. Finally, we reflect on observations from these studies and discuss related implications for engaging remote audiences in conversations about data.

Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualization and analytical tools. But for many people, spreadsheets - the quintessential table tool - remain a critical part of their information ecosystem, allowing them to interact with their data in ways that are hidden or abstracted in more complex tools. This is particularly true for data workers [61], people who work with data as part of their job but do not identify as professional analysts or data scientists. We report on a qualitative study of how these workers interact with and reason about their data. Our findings show that data tables serve a broader purpose beyond data cleanup at the initial stage of a linear analytic flow: users want to see and "get their hands on" the underlying data throughout the analytics process, reshaping and augmenting it to support sensemaking. They reorganize, mark up, layer on levels of detail, and spawn alternatives within the context of the base data. These direct interactions and human-readable table representations form a rich and cognitively important part of building understanding of what the data mean and what they can do with it. We argue that interactive tables are an important visualization idiom in their own right; that the direct data interaction they afford offers a fertile design space for visual analytics; and that sense making can be enriched by more flexible human-data interaction than is currently supported in visual analytics tools.

Effective use of data is an essential asset to modern cities. Visualization as a tool for analysis, exploration, and communication has become a driving force in the task of unravelling our complex urban fabrics. This paper outlines the findings from a series of three workshops from 2018-2020 bringing together experts in urban data visualization with the aim of exploring multidisciplinary perspectives from the human-centric lens. Based on the rich and detailed workshop discussions identifying challenges and opportunities for urban data visualization research, we outline major human-centric themes and considerations fundamental for CityVis design and introduce a framework for an urban visualization design space.

Dashboards are one of the most common use cases for data visualization, and their design and contexts of use are considerably different from exploratory visualization tools. In this paper, we look at the broad scope of how dashboards are used in practice through an analysis of dashboard examples and documentation about their use. We systematically review the literature surrounding dashboard use, construct a design space for dashboards, and identify major dashboard types. We characterize dashboards by their design goals, levels of interaction, and the practices around them. Our framework and literature review suggest a number of fruitful research directions to better support dashboard design, implementation, and use.

Families preserve memories of their special and everyday experiences, though it can be hard to capture all these moments in everyday life. We explore the concept of automated forms of capturing family life and presenting them through situated, tangible everyday artifacts in the home. We designed Time-Turner, an always-on video recording system along with a set of three drink coasters that allow family members to easily search, filter and replay videos to connect to their past. We engaged households in speculative enactments and interviews to explore the design space. Our findings point to the value of witnessing real rather than staged moments and the ways in which the affordances of everyday artifacts can allow media to be 'lived with' as a part of everyday life. Yet our design also revealed tensions around sharing and changing perceptions across time and generations. This points to design challenges around safeguarding this media and capturing 'reality' as opposed to curated content.

Communicating the right affect, a feeling, experience or emotion, is critical in creating engaging visual communication. We carried out three studies examining how different color properties (lightness, chroma and hue) and different palette properties (combinations and distribution of colors) contribute to different affective interpretations in information visualization where the numbers of colors is typically smaller than the rich palettes used in design. Our results show how color and palette properties can be manipulated to achieve affective expressiveness even in the small sets of colors used for data encoding in information visualization.

Feedback tools help people to monitor information about themselves to improve their health, sustainability practices, or personal well-being. Yet reasoning about personal data (e.g., pedometer counts, blood pressure readings, or home electricity consumption) to gain a deep understanding of your current practices and how to change can be challenging with the data alone. We integrate quantitative feedback data within a personal digital calendar; this approach aims to make the feedback data readily accessible and more comprehensible. We report on an eight-week field study of an on-calendar visualization tool. Results showed that a personal calendar can provide rich context for people to reason about their feedback data. The on-calendar visualization enabled people to quickly identify and reason about regular patterns and anomalies. Based on our results, we also derived a model of the behavior feedback process that extends existing technology adoption models. With that, we reflected on potential barriers for the ongoing use of feedback tools.

Data surrounds each and every one of us in our daily lives, ranging from exercise logs, to archives of our interactions with others on social media, to online resources pertaining to our hobbies. There is enormous potential for us to use these data to understand ourselves better and make positive changes in our lives. Visualization (Vis) and visual analytics (VA) offer substantial opportunities to help individuals gain insights about themselves, their communities and their interests; however, designing tools to support data analysis in non-professional life brings a unique set of research and design challenges. We investigate the requirements and research directions required to take full advantage of Vis and VA in a personal context. We develop a taxonomy of design dimensions to provide a coherent vocabulary for discussing personal visualization and personal visual analytics. By identifying and exploring clusters in the design space, we discuss challenges and share perspectives on future research. This work brings together research that was previously scattered across disciplines. Our goal is to call research attention to this space and engage researchers to explore the enabling techniques and technology that will support people to better understand data relevant to their personal lives, interests, and needs.

Abstract motion textures are widely applied in visual design and immersive environments such as games to imbue the environment or presentation with affect. While visual designers and artists carefully manipulate visual elements such as colour, form and motion to evoke affect, understanding what aspects of motion contribute to this still remains a matter of designer craft rather than validated principle. We report an empirical study of how simple features of motion in 3D textures, or motionscapes, contribute to the elicitation of affect. 12 university students were recruited to evaluate a series of 3D motionscapes. Results showed basic motion properties including speed, direction, path curvature and shape had significant influence on affective impressions such as valence, comfort, urgency and intensity, suggesting further directions for applications and explorations in this design space.

While single-accelerometers are a common consumer embedded sensors, their use in representing movement data as an intelligent resource remains scarce. Accelerometers have been used in movement recognition systems, but rarely to assess expressive qualities of movement. We present a prototype of wearable system for the real-time detection and classification of movement quality using acceleration data. The system applies Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to recognize Laban Effort qualities from acceleration input using a Machine Learning software that generates classifications in real time. Existing LMA-recognition systems rely on motion capture data and video data, and can only be deployed in controlled settings. Our single-accelerometer system is portable and can be used under a wide range of environmental conditions. We evaluate the performance of the system, present two applications using the system in the digital arts and discuss future directions.

We illustrate how technology has influenced creative, embodied practices in urban dance styles by analyzing how technological metaphors underlie conceptual representations of the body, space, and movement in three related styles of urban dance: liquid, digitz , and finger tutting . The creative and technical embodied practices of urban dancers are not well understood in either the ethnographic or creative movement scholarly literature. Following an exploratory netnography of movement practitioners, we claim that unlike most dancers of traditional genres or other urban dance styles, dancers of these three styles frequently employ representations of the body and of space that are geometrical, mathematical, mechanical, or digital. To explain how viewers perceive and understand these metaphors, we extend the perceptual theory of structure from motion in order to apply dance performance reception theory to a model we call 'Structural Illusion from Embodied Motion' (SIEM). Our analysis of performance techniques of these styles suggests that during performance, dancers leverage SIEM to represent two types of 'illusions' to viewers: a) the dancer's body has a reconfigurable structure; and b) the dancer is immersed in a virtual environment that contains invisible, mutable objects and structures that are revealed only through the dancer's movement. The three dance styles exemplify a trend in popular dance in which body, space, and time are understood in the language of technology.

Energy consumption is a growing concern and it is important to inform families of their consumption and how they might reduce it. We conducted an interview study that focuses on the existing routines of families and how they currently understand their power and gas consumption based on standard utility bills. We also investigated how this understanding ties to their everyday activities as might be recorded on their calendars. This allowed us to assess calendars as an artifact for energy consumption awareness. Our results show that many people relate changes in energy consumption to high-level effects such as weather and temperature and not necessarily their own everyday activities. Events on calendars may aid this understanding but people do not currently record enough information on their calendars to make a strong tie. This suggests that if calendars are to be used as artifacts to aid energy consumption understanding, digital calendars need to provide support to include more energy-related information, including both activities and patterns of consumption.

Overlaid reference elements need to be sufficiently visible to effectively relate to the underlying information, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. We seek to create guidelines for presenting such structures through experimental studies to define boundary conditions for visual intrusiveness. We base our work on the practice of designers, who use transparency to integrate overlaid grids with their underlying imagery. Previous work discovered a useful range of alpha values for black or white grids overlayed on scatterplot images rendered in shades of gray over gray backgrounds of different lightness values. This work compares black grids to blue and red ones on different image types of scatterplots and maps. We expected that the coloured grids over grayscale images would be more visually salient than black ones, resulting in lower alpha values. Instead, we found that there was no significant difference between the boundaries set for red and black grids, but that the boundaries for blue grids were set consistently higher (more opaque). As in our previous study, alpha values are affected by image density rather than image type, and are consistently lower than many default settings. These results have implications for the design of subtle reference structures.

Visual elements such as grids, labels, and contour lines act as reference structures that support the primary information being presented. Such structures need to be usefully visible, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. Visual designers know how to carefully manage transparency and layering in an image to balance these elements. We want the presentation of these structures in complex, dynamic, computer-generated visualizations to reflect the same subtlety and comfort of good design. Our goal is to determine the physical, perceptual, and cognitive characteristics of such structures in a way that enables automatic presentation. Our approach to this problem does not try to characterize "ideal” or "best,” but instead seeks boundary conditions that define a range of visible yet subtle legibility. All presentations that are clearly bad lie outside of this range, and can easily be avoided. In this paper, we report three experiments investigating the effects of grid color and spacing on these boundary conditions, defined by manipulating the transparency (alpha) of thin rectangular grids over scatter plots. Our results show that while there is some variation due to user preference and image properties, bounding alpha allows us to reliably predict a range of usable yet unobtrusive grids over a wide variety of conditions.

Providing effective feedback on resource consumption in the home is a key challenge of environmental conservation efforts. One promising approach for providing feedback about residential energy consumption is the use of ambient and artistic visualizations. Pervasive computing technologies enable the integration of such feedback into the home in the form of distributed point-of-consumption feedback devices to support decision-making in everyday activities. However, introducing these devices into the home requires sensitivity to the domestic context. In this paper we describe three abstract visualizations and suggest four design requirements that this type of device must meet to be effective: pragmatic, aesthetic, ambient, and ecological. We report on the findings from a mixed methods user study that explores the viability of using ambient and artistic feedback in the home based on these requirements. Our findings suggest that this approach is a viable way to provide resource use feedback and that both the aesthetics of the representation and the context of use are important elements that must be considered in this design space.

Abstract Most approaches to representing causality, such as the common causal graph, require a separate and static view, but in many cases it is useful to add the dimension of causality to the context of an existing visualization. Building on research from perceptual psychology that shows the perception of causality is a low‐level visual event derived from certain types of motion, we are investigating how to add animated causal representations, called visual causal vectors, onto other visualizations. We refer to these as causal overlays. Our initial experimental results show this approach has great potential but that extra cues are needed to elicit the perception of causality when the motions are overlaid on other graphical objects. In this paper we describe the approach and report on a study that examined two issues of this technique: how to accurately convey the causal flow and how to represent the strength of the causal effect.

Collaboration often relies on all group members having a shared view of a single-user application. A common situation is a single active presenter sharing a live view of her workstation screen with a passive audience, using simple hardware-based video signal projection onto a large screen or simple bitmap-based sharing protocols. This offers simplicity and some advantages over more sophisticated software-based replication solutions, but everyone has the exact same view of the application. This conflicts with the presenter's need to keep some information and interaction details private. It also fails to recognize the needs of the passive audience, who may struggle to follow the presentation because of verbosity, display clutter or insufficient familiarity with the application.Views that cater to the different roles of the presenter and the audience can be provided by custom solutions, but these tend to be bound to a particular application. In this paper we describe a general technique and implementation details of a prototype system that allows standardized role-specific views of existing single-user applications and permits additional customization that is application-specific with no change to the application source code. Role-based policies control manipulation and display of shared windows and image buffers produced by the application, providing semi-automated privacy protection and relaxed verbosity to meet both presenter and audience needs.

CSCW is one mechanism by which the TeleLearning Exchange Project promotes collaboration in the interdisciplinary research of the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (TL-NCE). Affiliated researchers are encouraged to share informal knowledge of their projects via three major strategies: site visits by an integration officer, a community Web repository (http://teleport.techbc.ca) and collaborative visits by students. An informal goal of the TeleLearning Exchange is to scaffold the next generation of collaborative researchers by actively involving students affiliated with the TL-NCE as agents of interdisciplinary cooperation and technical integration. The paper describes the design and development issues surrounding a Web repository tool to build a community of practice.

Many information structures are represented as two-dimensional networks (connected graphs) of links and nodes. Because these network tend to be large and quite complex, people often perfer to view part or all of the network at varying levels of detail. Hierarchical clustering provides a framework for viewing the network at different levels of detail by superimposing a hierarchy on it. Nodes are grouped into clusters, and clusters are themselves place into other clusters. Users can then navigate these clusters until an appropiate level of detail is reached. This article describes an experiment comparing two methods for viewing hierarchically clustered networks. Traditional full-zoom techniques provide details of only the current level of the hierarchy. In contrast, fisheye views, generated by the “variable-zoom” algorithm described in this article, provide information about higher levels as well. Subjects using both viewing methods were given problem-solving tasks requiring them to navigate a network, in this case, a simulated telephone system, and to reroute links in it. Results suggest that the greater context provided by fisheye views significantly improved user performance. Users were quicker to complete their task and made fewer unnecessary navigational steps through the hierarchy. This validation of fisheye views in important for designers of interfaces to complicated monitoring systems, such as control rooms for supervisory control and data acquistion systems, where efficient human performance is often critical. However, control room operators remained concerned about the size and visibility tradeoffs between the fine room operators remained concerned about the size and visibility tradeoffs between the fine detail provided by full-zoom techniques and the global context supplied by fisheye views. Specific interface feaures are required to reconcile the differences.

Navigatingand viewing large information spaces, such as hierarchically-organized networks from complex realtime systems, suffer the problems of viewing a large space on a small screen.Distorted-view approaches, such as fisheye techniques, have great potential to reduce these problems by representing detail within its larger context but introduce new issues of focus, transition between views and user disorientation from excessive distortion.We present a fisheye-based method which supports multiple focus points, enhances continuity through smooth transitions between views, and maintains location constraints to reduce the user's sense of spatial disorientation.These are important requirements for the representation and navigation of networked systems in supervisory control applications.The method consists of two steps: a global allocation of space to rectangular sections of the display, based on scale factors, followed by degree-of-interest adjustments.Previous versions of the algorithm relied solely on relative scale factors to assign size; we present a new version which allocates space more efficiently using a dynamically calculated degree of interest.In addition to the automatic system sizing, manual user control over the amount of space assigned each area is supported.The amount of detail shown in various parts of the network is controlled by pruning the hierarchy and presenting those sections in summary form.