Existing toolkits for data physicalization prioritize ease of use and adoption by novices. This is often achieved by limiting the affordances of the materials used and constraining design possibilities. The result is limited opportunities for creating expressive physicalizations. To address this limitation and to better understand how to support the creation process of expressive physicalizations, we created ClayPhys, a low-fidelity data physicalization toolkit designed to encourage making expressive data physicalizations. Our toolkit consists of clay, clay work tools, instruction and documentation handbooks, and warm-up activities that scaffold the design process. We studied the use of ClayPhys in a one-day workshop with nine expert participants. From our analysis of participants’ created data physicalizations, we observed that using ClayPhys, participants could map data to different visual and physical variables, and that their designs incorporated various data interaction styles. Informed by our findings, we discuss implications for designing higher-fidelity expressive data physicalization toolkits.

In sustainable HCI, the ‘Cornucopian Paradigm’ describes how the expansion of digital services goes hand in hand with the growth of digital infrastructure and its environmental footprint. Yet, the mechanisms driving this paradigm are not well understood at the design level. As a case study, we investigate how messaging apps factor in the cornucopian paradigm by conducting a feature analysis of 17 apps complemented with 12 user interviews. We identify four scale-up mechanisms that explain how design contributes to the cornucopian paradigm. These mechanisms all contribute to use intensification, i.e., digital practices becoming more intensive and leading to more data intensity, to infrastructure expansion, and indirectly to device obsolescence and replacement. Our analysis of use intensification builds upon a set of recurring cornucopian design patterns we identified in messaging apps. To mitigate the cornucopian paradigm, we propose a set of moderation heuristics to guide design decisions.

Video tutorials are the main medium to learn novel software skills. However, the User Interface (UI) presented in a video tutorial may differ from the learner’s UI because of customizations or differences in software versions. We investigate the frictions resulting from such differences on a learners’ ability to reproduce a task demonstrated in a video tutorial. Through a morphological analysis, we first identify 13 types of “interface differences" that differ in terms of availability, reachability and spatial location of features in the interface. To better assess the frictions resulting from each of these differences, we then conduct a laboratory study with 26 participants instructed to reproduce a vector graphics editing task. Our results highlight interesting UI comparison behaviors, and illustrate various approaches employed to visually locate features.

Orchestrating digital devices in classrooms is challenging. We conducted an observational study to understand how teachers manage multi-device classrooms involving tablets, computers, and video-projectors. Two categories of device management tasks stand out: content sharing and remote control. Based on our observations, we identify 17 multi-device management tasks that are important to teachers in this specific device configuration. We conducted a second study to investigate how teachers could perform these tasks with the help of a smartwatch. For remote control tasks, participants preferred smartwatches to interact from a distance, whereas for content-sharing tasks, they preferred to interact directly with the devices displaying the content. We outline design opportunities for multi-device management controls in learning environments, and challenges for HCI research on classroom orchestration.

Situated visualization is an emerging concept within visualization, in which data is visualized in situ, where it is relevant to people. The concept has gained interest from multiple research communities, including visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI) and augmented reality. This has led to a range of explorations and applications of the concept, however, this early work has focused on the operational aspect of situatedness leading to inconsistent adoption of the concept and terminology. First, we contribute a literature survey in which we analyze 44 papers that explicitly use the term "situated visualization" to provide an overview of the research area, how it defines situated visualization, common application areas and technology used, as well as type of data and type of visualizations. Our survey shows that research on situated visualization has focused on technology-centric approaches that foreground a spatial understanding of situatedness. Secondly, we contribute five perspectives on situatedness (space, time, place, activity, and community) that together expand on the prevalent notion of situatedness in the corpus. We draw from six case studies and prior theoretical developments in HCI. Each perspective develops a generative way of looking at and working with situatedness in design and research. We outline future directions, including considering technology, material and aesthetics, leveraging the perspectives for design, and methods for stronger engagement with target audiences. We conclude with opportunities to consolidate situated visualization research.

Abstract We propose to take an artifact‐centric approach to design studies by leveraging the concept of boundary object. Design studies typically focus on processes and articulate design decisions in a project‐specific context with a goal of transferability. We argue that design studies could benefit from paying attention to the material conditions in which teams collaborate to reach design outcomes. We report on a design study of isochrone maps following cartographic generalization principles. Focusing on boundary objects enables us to characterize five categories of artifacts and tools that facilitated collaboration between actors involved in the design process (structured collections, structuring artifacts, process‐centric artifacts, generative artifacts, and bridging artifacts). We found that artifacts such as layered maps and map collections played a unifying role for our inter‐disciplinary team. We discuss how such artifacts can be pivotal in the design process. Finally, we discuss how considering boundary objects could improve the transferability of design study results, and support reflection on inter‐disciplinary collaboration in the domain of Information Visualization.

Design research methods are increasingly used as ready-made recipes for success in a variety of fields and multidisciplinary teams. Yet as any tools, they shape the gaze, attitudes, and behaviors of designers. Moreover their generic nature tends to obscure the specific situations in which they were created. In reaction, grounding our work in adversarial design, we propose four tricky probes: believable design tools, which appear to be innocuous, but progressively engage designers in crossing boundaries of what should be acceptable. This is done by slowly derailing design research activities, leading to trigger reflection on the part of designers on their beliefs, practice, and the tools they use. Our probes raise issues at the intersection of design research and gender in urban service design, such as the use of pre-made algorithms to understand gendered patterns in urban movements.

In this pictorial, we investigate how a virtual collection can put down its roots in a physical space and integrate into the local community. We present PLACED, a place-centric digital service that supports participation and community-production of knowledge in library events. We illustrate how PLACED has been deployed and used at a local public library over a six-month period. We examine the community-produced virtual collection that grew out of this library event with a focus on its placeness.

We investigate how to design community technologies for public events. We do so with a focus on technologies that give rise to new forms of participation and knowledge co-production in public libraries. Specifically, we deployed a digital service at a major public library during its four-week creative workshop series. The system offered an alternative way for people to work together as a community, to go beyond achieving individual goals, and to contribute to the achievement of public goals (e.g., building community bookshelves). We report on how the system has reconfigured physical spaces and afforded new social practices in the library. We propose Computational Alternatives as a fruitful approach for gaining situated, nuanced insights into a technology's possible adoption. We offer key insights in the form of computational alternatives vignettes -- grounded stories that encapsulate sociotechnical implications of technology, pointing to plausible alternative futures.

International audience

Situated sketching and enactment aim at grounding designs in the spatial, social and cultural practices of a particular place. This is particularly relevant when designing for public places in which human activities are open-ended, multi-faceted, and difficult to anticipate, such as libraries, train stations, or commercial areas. In order to investigate situated sketching and enactment, we developed Ébauche. It enables designers to collaboratively sketch interfaces, distribute them across multiple displays and enact use cases. We present the lessons learned from six situated sketching and enactment workshops on public displays with Ébauche. And we present the results of a controlled study with 8 pairs of designers who used paper and Ébauche. We present the various ways in which participants leveraged the place, and how paper or Ébauche influenced the integration of their designs in the place. Looking at the design outcomes, our results suggest that paper leads to broader exploration of ideas and deeper physical integration in the environment. Whereas Ébauche leads to more refined sketches and more animated enactments.

Computational notebooks combine code, visualizations, and text in a single document. Researchers, data analysts, and even journalists are rapidly adopting this new medium. We present three studies of how they are using notebooks to document and share exploratory data analyses. In the first, we analyzed over 1 million computational notebooks on GitHub, finding that one in four had no explanatory text but consisted entirely of visualizations or code. In a second study, we examined over 200 academic computational notebooks, finding that although the vast majority described methods, only a minority discussed reasoning or results. In a third study, we interviewed 15 academic data analysts, finding that most considered computational notebooks personal, exploratory, and messy. Importantly, they typically used other media to share analyses. These studies demonstrate a tension between exploration and explanation in constructing and sharing computational notebooks. We conclude with opportunities to encourage explanation in computational media without hindering exploration.

Computational notebooks aim to support collaborative data analysis by combining code, visualizations, and text in a single easily shared document. Yet, as notebooks evolve and grow they often become difficult to navigate or understand, discouraging sharing and reuse. We present the design and evaluation of a Jupyter Notebook extension providing facilities for annotated cell folding. Through a lab study and multi-week deployment we find cell folding aids notebook navigation and comprehension, not only by the original author, but also by collaborators viewing the notebook in a meeting or revising it on their own. However, in some cases cell folding encouraged collaborators to overlook folded sections or spend longer reviewing a notebook before editing it. These findings extend our understanding of code folding's trade-offs to a new medium and demonstrate its benefits for everyday collaboration. We conclude by discussing how dynamic reorganization can support sharing and reuse of computational notebooks.

Users must manage frequent software and operating system upgrades across multiple computing devices. While current research focuses primarily on the security aspect, we investigate the user's perspective of upgrading software. Our first study (n=65) found that users delay major upgrades by an average of 80 days. We then ran a field study (n=14), beginning with in-depth observations during an operating system upgrade, followed by a four-week diary study. Very few participants prepared for upgrades (e.g., backing up files), and over half had negative reactions to the upgrade process and other changes (e.g., bugs, lost settings, unwanted features). During the upgrade process, waiting times were too long, feedback was confusing or misleading, and few had clear mental models of what was happening. Users almost never mentioned security as a concern or reason for upgrading. By contrast, interviews (n=3) with technical staff responsible for one organization's upgrades focused only on security and licensing, not user interface changes. We conclude with recommendations to improve the user's upgrade experience.

International audience

Resuming suspended activities is fundamental to knowledge work. As activities grow in complexity or fade from memory, they become increasingly difficult to cognitively resume. Motivated by the efficiency of images for cueing autobiographical memory, we conducted 2 studies of how visual histories of computer-mediated activity might aid users in restoring the mental context of suspended activities. In the first exploratory study we demonstrate that users provided a visual history consisting of small thumbnail images of their desktop can reconstruct detailed mental contexts of earlier computer work. In the second observational study we examine methods and cues that web developers, scientific writers, and graphic designers currently use to restore mental context. We find that participants from all three professions engage in situated sensemaking, reconstructing context by generating stories to explain cues in their documents with implicit meaning, such as sudden changes in writing quality or the shape of blocks of code. We identify characteristics of each activity that influence the information, artifacts, and strategies participants used to reconstruct context. We conclude that visual histories can help users reconstruct mental context but that challenges remain in designing lightweight image-based cues that help users reconstruct context for a range of activities.

Mobile devices offer great opportunities in the field of collaborative learning. They are especially interesting in their ability to provide digital information while still supporting social interactions between group members, which are essential elements of coordinated and shared activities. However, in truly mobile conditions, e.g. outdoors, the high variability of groups spatial configurations can potentially modify coordination mechanisms. We designed and tested an orienteering mobile learning game to better understand how device use shaped collaboration in highly mobile conditions. The study involved four groups of three students all equipped with tablets. We focused our analysis on the relationship between participants' arrangements (F-formations), their device usage and coordination mechanisms (i.e. awareness, regulation, information sharing, and discussion). Our results emphasize the importance of considering the transitions between arrangements more than F-formations per se. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and analysis of mobile collaborative activities.

Peripheral interaction, like ambient information systems (AIS), aims at leveraging the periphery of our attention. While ambient information systems address the perception of information, peripheral interaction targets lightweight interaction outside of the current focus of attention. A number of prototypes have demonstrated the value of peripheral interaction through long-term in-situ deployments. Such studies are particularly suited to evaluate peripheral interaction since they enable the integration of devices into daily routines and thereby move interaction to the periphery of attention. However, they do not lend themselves well to early design phases. In fact, the design process completely lacks early evaluation tools to assess design choices.

Data sculptures are a promising type of visualizations in which data is given a physical form. In the past, they have mostly been used for artistic, communicative or educational purposes, and designers of data sculptures argue that in such situations, physical visualizations can be more enriching than pixel-based visualizations. We present the design of Activity Sculptures: data sculptures of running activity. In a three-week field study we investigated the impact of the sculptures on 14 participants' running activity, the personal and social behaviors generated by the sculptures, as well as participants' experiences when receiving these individual physical tokens generated from the specific data of their runs. The physical rewards generated curiosity and personal experimentation but also social dynamics such as discussion on runs or envy/competition. We argue that such passive (or calm) visualizations can complement nudging and other mechanisms of persuasion with a more playful and reflective look at ones' activity.

In this paper we present a field trial of the eLabBench, a digital tabletop-based laboratory bench designed to support the exploratory practices of molecular biologists in the laboratory. The eLabBench supports the organization of personal information, capture of experimental work for later access, and the use of a variety of computational resources directly at the lab bench. We deployed the eLabBench in a biology laboratory for 16 weeks, and invited seven molecular biologists to run experiments on it. We report on how they used the bench and how it fitted within their larger experimental process. The main impact of the eLabBench lies in the changes it sparked off in preparing, running, and documenting lab experiments. By supporting computation at the bench and management of physical objects in the office, the eLabBench blurred the separation between office and laboratory work. Based on our observations, we discuss how interactive systems for laboratories such as the eLabBench can support a more exploratory or design-oriented way of 'doing' science.

The success of a volunteer computing infrastructure depends on the contributions of its users. An example of such an infrastructure is the Mini-Grid, a local peer-to-peer system used for computational analysis of DNA. The speed of analysis increases as more users join the Mini-Grid. However, the invisible nature of such an infrastructure hinders adoption, as it is difficult for users to participate in an infrastructure they are not aware of. This paper introduces GridOrbit, a system designed to increase user awareness, fostering contributions to this infrastructure. We designed GridOrbit using a participatory design process with biologists, and subsequently deployed it for use in a biology laboratory. Our results indicate that the number of contributors to the Mini-Grid increased with the use of awareness technologies. In addition, our analysis presents their motives and behaviors. Finally, a characterization of user interaction with GridOrbit emerged, which enabled us to understand how awareness systems can be better designed. We see GridOrbit as an example of a broader class of technologies designed to create "Infrastructure Awareness" as a means to increase the contributions to technological infrastructures.

Interactive surfaces like diffuse illumination tabletops (DIT) identify and track objects using multiple techniques like shape and color recognition, fiducial markers, electronic components, and RFID tags. However, tracking becomes more complex when dealing with multiple small objects of similar form. We propose to use tangible mediators for integrating such objects to tabletops. This paper reports on our initial explorations of mediated tabletop interaction consisting of a mediator prototype and a design space definition. We built a mediator, the Rabbit, a device that translates thevalue of an RFID tag into a visual 2D code. The Rabbit rests on the interactive surface, holds the object, reads its passive RFID tag, and converts the read value into a 2D code that can be read by the DIT's built-in camera. When handling multiple objects, the Rabbit iterates through the generated 2D codes. Through a series of participatory activities with end users (molecular biologists), we collected initial feedback from participants and defined a design space for mediated tabletop interaction.

Infrastructure awareness systems reveal invisible aspects of infrastructures to their existing or potential users. Designing such systems is challenging as it requires making visible the hidden activity of infrastructures while providing information of interest to the users. To address this challenge we introduce the AMC technique (for Awareness Model Cards). This technique relies conceptually on awareness model's concepts of nimbus and focus. The main objective is to match the users' interests to the information the infrastructure awareness systems can provide, through the use of card matching. This technique provides three benefits: 1) evaluate how relevant is the information displayed by infrastructure awareness systems; 2) identify which of users' interests infrastructure awareness systems do not take into account; 3) identify elements of re-design in the infrastructures themselves, so to improve their adoption.

We report on our studies of the evolving work practices of biologists and the role paper and electronic lab notebooks play in supporting their individual and collaborative activity. We describe the participatory design and longitudinal field testing of Prism, a hybrid laboratory notebook that lets biologists capture, visualize and interact with cross-linked streams of physical and electronic data. We used Prism as a technology probe that users could adapt to integrate additional activity streams and share information from other biologists. Our key findings include the use of master notebooks, whether paper or electronic, which act as a reference point for handling and organizing the diverse strands of personal activity, and the importance of redundancy, which biologists use to make sense of their data. Prism provides a flexible, extensible tool that supports individual and collaborative reflection in creative work.

PageLinker is a browser extension that allows to contextualise navigation by linking web pages together and to navigate through a network of related web pages without prior planning. The design is based on extensive interviews with biologists, which highlighted their difficulties finding previously visited web pages. They found current browser tools inadequate, resulting in poorly organised bookmarks and rarely used history lists. In a four-week controlled field experiment, PageLinker significantly reduced time, page loads and mouse clicks. By presenting links in context, PageLinker facilitates web page revisitation, is less prone to bookmark overload and is highly robust to change.