Amid rapid data streaming and declining mental health, there is a critical need to enhance the public’s ability to self-reflect and work on their mental wellbeing. Holding Your Mind is a series of artist-made personal data physicalizations that engage young students to record data relevant to their mental activity (electroencephalograph (EEG), heart rate, and narrative) during familiar tasks, and returned to them as personalized art sculptures to hold, interact with, and reflect. Our poster outlines the material characteristics through which Holding Your Mind sculptures embody mind data into body-relatable and perceptually enticing objects, procuring an embodied experience of self-cognition and reflection From the case of our sculptures, we draw preliminary insights on the use of artistic data embodiments to mediate the users’ relationship to self-tracking technology, reaching beyond quantification, to facilitate reflective practice for mental wellbeing. We lay groundwork for further study of data physicalization’s materiality in a mental wellbeing space, and its use in pre-clinical interventions helping foster a more aware and compassionate society.

Visualization design study is a widely adopted approach for developing tailored visual solutions to domain-specific problems through close interdisciplinary collaboration. While the visualization community has proposed generalizable frameworks, there is a growing need for domain-aware methodologies that address discipline-specific challenges and refine design study practices. To investigate how domain characteristics and collaborator roles influence the design study process, we conducted interviews with 15 experts, including domain specialists from the humanities, arts, applied sciences, and artificial intelligence, as well as visualization researchers and developers, with direct experience in design studies. Our findings reveal tensions and opportunities that arise from differing expectations, communication styles, and levels of engagement among collaborators at various stages of the design process, including problem formulation, co-design, and evaluation. We highlight how domain-specific norms and role dynamics shape collaboration and influence the trajectory of visualization projects. Based on these insights, we offer practical considerations to help visualization researchers anticipate domain-specific challenges, foster mutual understanding, and adapt their methods accordingly. Our study contributes to ongoing efforts to support more context-sensitive, sustainable, and inclusive design study practices across diverse application domains.