Many potential benefits of data physicalizations are thought to stem from their tangible nature and their presence in a shared space, which allows for physical interaction in a social environment. Prior research has studied where observers touch data physicalizations and how these touches depend on task. However, limited research explores the moment-by-moment details of touches, gestures, and verbal dialogue and how these interactions contribute to the larger data physicalization sensemaking process. This case study offers a new data analysis from a previous study to provide fine-grained accounting of one participant’s touches, gestures, and conversations around a data object. We identify four types of touches and gestures and describe relational patterns between individual interactions. This work provides a foundation for further exploring the reasons people touch or gesture with data physicalizations, connecting these efforts with gesture studies research, and identifying design implications for data physicalization.

Small-scale and alternative farming is difficult, precarious work; most small farms in the United States survive less than ten years. Yet these food systems are an important site for developing sustainable, local, and justice-based practices that can impact many of the large challenges we face today. Building on rural HCI research in the CSCW community, this paper takes an autoethnographic approach to exploring undocumented economic systems between vendors at a farmers market in the United States. We draw on Tronto’s ethical qualities of care to understand the gifting and trading of labor, goods, knowledge, and emotional support between vendors. Based on these first-hand experiences, we offer research opportunities for HCI that could support caring economic systems in communities.

International audience

To design bodily data representations, it is helpful to understand how people move. Bertin codified graphic design principles for data visualization and Hornecker et al. describe a design vocabulary for data physicalization. Yet, few frameworks guide the creation of data representations that use people's bodies as the material for design, or data representations that create a felt experience of data through movement. In this pictorial, we propose a set of movement parameters to serve as building blocks for body-based data representations. Our framework, consisting of six movement parameters each with up to seven sub-parameters, synthesizes the theoretical work of movement experts in Western traditions and contextualizes it in data representation based on a 10-session workshop series with dancers. Two case studies demonstrate how the movement parameters were applied to create bodily data representations intended to be viewed by an audience and bodily data representations intended to be somatically experienced.

The proliferation of data throughout society has produced an increased interest in novel ways to represent information to provide new insights, re-humanize data, or allow broader participation. Many novel data representations allow people to physically interact with information by picking up, touching, and manipulating artefacts that encode data through their material properties. In this paper, we draw on the arts to explore how we might design for deeper physical engagement with data. How can we feel data through movements, instead of through objects? We examine nine instructional movement sequences created by five dancers as part of a larger workshop on data and dance. Our findings shed light on promising design strategies for somatically-focused data representations including observations on the relational, layered, and emotionally engaged approaches taken by dancers. We also reflect on these approaches in relation to soma design and identify areas for future work in "data somatics."

Traces of touch provide valuable insight into how we interact with the physical world. Measuring touch behavior, however, is expensive and imprecise. Utilizing a fluorescent UV tracer powder, we developed a low-cost analog method to capture persistent, high-contrast touch records on arbitrary objects. We describe our process for selecting a tracer, methods for capturing, enhancing, and aggregating traces, and approaches to examining qualitative aspects of the user experience. Three user studies demonstrate key features of this method. First, we show that it provides clear and durable traces on objects representative of scientific visualization, physicalization, and product design. Second, we demonstrate how this method could be used to study touch perception, by measuring how task and narrative framing elicit different touch behaviors on the same object. Third, we demonstrate how this method can be used to evaluate data physicalizations by observing how participants touch two different physicalizations of COVID-19 time-series data.

Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well-being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping review to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded throughout the broader SHCI literature and to find new research opportunities. We identify several themes that could benefit from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies. Finally, we discuss opportunities for further work on marine human-natural systems research in SHCI and interdisciplinary collaboration with marine science and coastal communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge of information visualizations that aim to increase our scientific understanding and communicate about the ongoing health crisis with the general public. In this time, there has also been significant use of data visualization language in artefacts from online communities that provide commentary on the pandemic and create meaning through participatory digital culture. Using a qualitative approach, this paper examines over 300 memes collected from a public social media group targeted to young adults in the United States that uses the language of data visualization to discuss topics related to COVID-19. We outline four main ways that data visualization language is used in these memes-as a coarse indicator, as a visual analogy, as an opportunity for augmentation with emotion or interpretation, and as a visual pun-as well as two ways that memes leverage traditional and emerging approaches in the information visualization community. We describe the context in which these memes are socially created and interpreted in light of the political nature of online spaces and connect this work to ongoing research on participation, emotion, and embodiment in information visualization. These results aim to start a conversation about the use of data visualization language in digital culture and more casual networked environments beyond official channels.

Over the last decade growing amounts of government data have been made available in an attempt to increase transparency and civic participation, but it is unclear if this data serves non-expert communities due to gaps in access and the technical knowledge needed to interpret this "open" data. We conducted a two-year design study focused on the creation of a community-based data display using the United States Environmental Protection Agency data on water permit violations by oil storage facilities on the Chelsea Creek in Massachusetts to explore whether situated data physicalization and Participatory Action Research could support meaningful engagement with open data. We selected this data as it is of interest to local groups and available online, yet remains largely invisible and inaccessible to the Chelsea community. The resulting installation, Chemicals in the Creek, responds to the call for community-engaged visualization processes and provides an application of situated methods of data representation. It proposes event-centered and power-aware modes of engagement using contextual and embodied data representations. The design of Chemicals in the Creek is grounded in interactive workshops and we analyze it through event observation, interviews, and community outcomes. We reflect on the role of community engaged research in the Information Visualization community relative to recent conversations on new approaches to design studies and evaluation.

Each morning we select an outfit meant to suit our mood and our plans. What if our clothes could seamlessly morph with us as our attitudes and activities change throughout the day? We created Awakened Apparel; one of the first shape-changing fashions to employ pneumatically actuated origami. Our prototype draws from diverse disciplines including soft robotics and fashion to present a design vision that advances the growing field of dynamic interactive garments. We explore technical and fabrication approaches for shape-changing technology held close to the body and identify areas for further innovation.