While it is proven that the individual construction of a data physicalization aids personal sense-making, little is known about how sense-making is negotiated when it is shared by multiple, co-located participants. Since participatory data physicalization can inadvertently prioritize dominant views, we interpreted data feminism principles to design a collaborative physicalization construction process that empowers stakeholders and participants to co-determine how meanings are represented. This process revealed how the interplay of physical and non-physical actions during construction negotiations supported collaborative sense-making among 14 groups of 55 participants during 4 workshops, enabling us to articulate how explicit power is embodied by the physicalization artifact and negotiated between authoring and collaborating participants, and facilitators; whereas tacit power operates through artifact meanings, participant identity and design decisions. By providing one operationalization of data-feminist critique into the form of design requirements, our contributions support the design of more equitable physicalization and visualization construction methods.

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

Social virtual reality (VR) encompasses a growing network of three-dimensional virtual worlds where users interact in a shared, embodied way. While research has focused on the social interactions between the users themselves, less is known about how the design of virtual spaces influences these interactions. Our study combines interviews with 15 social VR users logging over 1,000 hours and a 20-hour spatial protocol of a purposeful sampling of VR worlds. We analysed how spatial characteristics (including proportion, sightlines, materiality, atmosphere, and navigation) influence meaningful user interaction to turn space into place. We synthesised four place types for a new social VR typology: Cuddle worlds that encourage cosy conversations; Mingle worlds that facilitate new encounters; Venture worlds that promote exploration; and Guided worlds that elicit a sense of belonging with the online community. By relating architectural affordances to social patterns, we contribute insights towards the purposeful design of social VR places.

Although intended to foster spontaneous interactions among workers, a typical open-plan office layout cannot mitigate visual, acoustic, or privacy-related distractions that originate from unplanned meetings. As office workers often refrain from tackling these issues by manually demarcating or physically relocating to a more suitable subspace that is enclosed by movable partitions, we hypothesise that these subspaces could instead be robotically manifested. This study therefore evaluated the perceived impact of two mobile robotic partitions that were wizarded to jointly manifest an enclosed subspace, to: 1) either `mitigate' or `intervene' in the distractions caused by spontaneous face-to-face or remote meetings; or 2) either `gesturally' or `spatially' nudge a distraction-causing worker to relocate. Our findings suggest how robotic furniture should interact with office workers with and through transient space, and autonomously balance the distractions not only for each individual worker but also for multiple workers sharing the same workspace.

Participatory data physicalisation (PDP) is recognised for its potential to support data-driven decisions among stakeholders who collaboratively construct physical elements into commonly insightful visualisations. Like all participatory processes, PDP is however influenced by underlying power dynamics that might lead to issues regarding extractive participation, marginalisation, or exclusion, among others. We first identified the decisions behind these power dynamics by developing an ontology that synthesises critical theoretical insights from both visualisation and participatory design research, which were then systematically applied unto a representative corpus of 23 PDP artefacts. By revealing how shared decisions are guided by different agendas, this paper presents three contributions: 1) a cross-disciplinary ontology that facilitates the systematic analysis of existing and novel PDP artefacts and processes; which leads to 2) six PDP agendas that reflect the key power dynamics in current PDP practice, revealing the diversity of orientations towards stakeholder participation in PDP practice; and 3) a set of critical considerations that should guide how power dynamics can be balanced, such as by reflecting on how issues are represented, data is contextualised, participants express their meanings, and how participants can dissent with flexible artefact construction. Consequently, this study advances a feminist research agenda by guiding researchers and practitioners in openly reflecting on and sharing responsibilities in data physicalisation and participatory data visualisation.

The vision of adaptive architecture proposes that robotic technologies could enable interior spaces to physically transform in a bidirectional interaction with occupants. Yet, it is still unknown how this interaction could unfold in an understandable way. Inspired by HRI studies where robotic furniture gestured intents to occupants by deliberately positioning or moving in space, we hypothesise that adaptive architecture could also convey intents through gestures performed by a mobile robotic partition. To explore this design space, we invited 15 multidisciplinary experts to join co-design improvisation sessions, where they manually manoeuvred a deactivated robotic partition to design gestures conveying six architectural intents that varied in purpose and urgency. Using a gesture elicitation method alongside motion-tracking data, a Laban-based questionnaire, and thematic analysis, we identified 20 unique gestural strategies. Through categorisation, we introduced architectonic gestures as a novel strategy for robotic furniture to convey intent by indexically leveraging its spatial impact, complementing the established deictic and emblematic gestures. Our study thus represents an exploratory step toward making the autonomous gestures of adaptive architecture more legible. By understanding how robotic gestures are interpreted based not only on their motion but also on their spatial impact, we contribute to bridging HRI with Human-Building Interaction research.

This paper studies sand profile grading, a manipulation task to obtain a desired geometric curve in sand. Manipulating sand is challenging because like other amorphous materials, its properties are difficult to estimate and emergent effects such as collapses may occur which both influence the manipulation outcome. To tackle these challenges, humans iterate and adapt their manual actions to the observed material states. In this paper, we propose to replicate this adaptive and iterative approach on a robotic profile grading task. Our results demonstrate that (1) tool insertion adaptation reduces force limit violations during tool-material interactions, (2) grading angle adaptation ensures no undercutting or collisions while allowing for cutting or smoothing the sand profile, and (3) adapting progress speed to task evolution provides a balance between grading precision and execution time. This paper's findings pave the way for generalized and transferable robotic systems manipulating various amorphous materials and automating a larger set of construction tasks and beyond.

Organisations require diverse technological infrastructures to create value from data. Because these infrastructures are often haphazardly developed, they cause frictions between the socio-technical agencies of the involved stakeholders. Datopolis is a role-playing game consisting of cards, tiles and tokens that was specifically designed to support such stakeholders to experience, understand and reflect on how data infrastructures should be developed and maintained. Although the game has reached more than 20 organisations in 8 different countries since its original release 8 years ago, little is known about how its resources and rules actually elicit critical reflection among its players. By conducting a retrospective qualitative study consisting of 27 interviews with stakeholders, we uncovered that the prototypical role-playing narrative drives critical reflection through 3 facilitation approaches and 3 play strategies that are anchored in organisational contexts shared among players. We are thus able to present three contributions: 1) a retrospective study grounded in interviews with actual stakeholders being affected by the game; 2) an overview of play strategies and facilitation approaches that enacted the infrastructuring processes through role-play; and 3) critical considerations to operationalise how role-play supports learning, situated in real-world contexts and shaped by facilitation. This study calls for a critical examination of the role of interpretation during learning activities to empower stakeholders in reclaiming control over organisational practices.

The metaverse is an immersive virtual realm that allows millions of users to interact with each other, both described by the social intricacies of the everyday and unrestrained by the physical limitations of reality. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, the metaverse tends to simulate the architectural conventions of physical reality. By visiting the virtual reality sites of 30 interiors, buildings, and plazas within popular metaverse platforms, we identified outliers in convention to curate a ‘Metaverse Design Catalogue’ of architectural features that were uncommon or unrealistic in physical reality. We thus challenged 21 architectural experts to use the catalogue as a catalyst to design an architecture that goes beyond convention to become ‘superarchitectural’. Based on their redesigned and reimagined floor plans and perspective drawings, we inform the design language of a superarchitectural metaverse through the dimensions of architectural diegesis, mutability, and asymmetry.

Cross-Reality Transitional Interfaces support tasks that require interactions at different levels of virtuality. However, there is little knowledge on how such capabilities can be scaled on vertical and life-sized surfaces, by offering haptic feedback, transitioning the surface between physical and virtual environments, and moving the surface at room-scale. The aim of our study is to generate an empirical understanding of which combinations of mixed reality and a user-controlled movable robotic surface (resulting in four virtuality levels) are better suited to execute five tasks, which differed in terms of haptic feedback. During our user study (N=24), physical environment-physical surface was used most due to its familiarity and haptic feedback, while the virtual environment mode was experienced as more relaxing and fun, and the virtual surface mode as more convenient and safer.

Thousands of people regularly meet, work and play in the architectural spaces that the metaverse offers today. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, there exists a prevalent belief that the architectural design of the metaverse is rather conventional and reliant on simulating physical reality. We investigated this claim by conducting a design critique study of the most apparent architectural design conventions within the current most popular metaverse platforms, as determined by a scoping review and Google Trends analysis. Based on the opinions of 21 architectural experts on the design of interiors, buildings, and plazas within these platforms, we elicited three overarching design conventions that capture the representation, engagement, and purpose of metaverse architecture. By discussing the impact of these conventions on architectural quality, we inform the future design of metaverse spaces to more purposefully, and perhaps less frequently, use realism to convey meaning.

A typical open-plan office layout is unable to optimally host multiple collocated work activities, personal needs, and situational events, as its space exerts a range of environmental demands on workers in terms of maintaining their acoustic, visual or privacy comfort. As we hypothesise that these demands could be coped by optimising the environmental resources of the architectural layout, we deployed a mobile robotic partition that autonomously manoeuvres between predetermined locations. During a five-weeks in-the-wild study within a real-world open-plan office, we studied how 13 workers adopted four distinct adaptation strategies when sharing the spatiotemporal control of the robotic partition. Based on their logged and self-reported reasoning, we present six initiation regulating factors that determine the appropriateness of each adaptation strategy. This study thus contributes to how future human-building interaction could autonomously improve the experience, comfort, performance, and even the health and wellbeing of multiple workers that share the same workplace.

Public surveys intend to integrate civic values into official decision-making. Because such surveys are typically infrastructured from the top-down, citizens’ participatory agency is often reduced to reacting to concerns that may not align with their bottom-up needs. This paper presents PosterTalk, a physically situated and digitally facilitated middle-out survey platform that explicitly involved bottom-up citizens in its gatekeeping activities. Over a four months in-the-wild deployment, PosterTalk accumulated 41 inquiries and 420 responses spanning over 13 civic themes. Its emerging survey content directly influenced the local policy agenda of the facilitating neighbourhood committee, and nudged them to reassess their civic representativeness. By critically analysing the different survey content and stakeholder engagements, this paper contributes an encompassing middle-out framework to guide and benchmark participatory agency in future public survey deployments and offers four guidelines for diversifying bottom-up civic agendas, readjusting top-down representation, avoiding bottom-up misperceptions of power, and promoting top-down introspection.

The current state of Virtual Reality (VR) presents a limited and underwhelming user experience. Users are restricted from naturally walking beyond the physical boundaries of the real world, unable to fully explore large virtual environments. The virtual manifestation also often mirrors the physical features of the real world, neglecting the limitless possibilities of the virtual universe. In response to this limitation, this pictorial introduces Architectural Narrative VR, a generative environment that dynamically designs spaces on-the-fly. This approach enables users to roam freely within the constraints of their physical space, while the architectural proportions and rhythm of virtual spaces are designed to relate to external factors such as the sequential presentation of content and user behaviour. This work contributes to VR research by exploring new ways of generating virtual spaces that prioritise user-dependent rather than predefined manifestations of the architectural narrative, offering greater potential for immersive and multidimensional user experiences.

Media architecture exploits interactive technology to encourage passers-by to engage with an architectural environment. Whereas most media architecture installations focus on visual stimulation, we developed a permanent media facade that rhythmically knocks xylophone blocks embedded beneath 11 window sills, according to the human actions constantly traced via an overhead camera. In an attempt to overcome its apparent limitations in engaging passers-by more enduringly and purposefully, our study investigates the impact of feedforward learning, a constructive interaction method that instructs passers-by about the results of their actions. Based on a comparative (n=25) and a one-month in-the-wild (n=1877) study, we propose how feedforward learning could empower passers-by to understand the interaction of more abstract types of media architecture, and how particular quantitative indicators capturing this learning could predict how enduringly and purposefully a passer-might engage. We believe these contributions could inspire more creative integrations of non-visual modalities in future public interactive interventions.

Due to their historical nature, humanistic data encompass multiple sources of uncertainty. While humanists are accustomed to handling such uncertainty with their established methods, they are cautious of visualizations that appear overly objective and fail to communicate this uncertainty. To design more trustworthy visualizations for humanistic research, therefore, a deeper understanding of its relation to uncertainty is needed. We systematically reviewed 126 publications from digital humanities literature that use visualization as part of their research process, and examined how uncertainty was handled and represented in their visualizations. Crossing these dimensions with the visualization type and use, we identified that uncertainty originated from multiple steps in the research process from the source artifacts to their datafication. We also noted how besides known uncertainty coping strategies, such as excluding data and evaluating its effects, humanists also embraced uncertainty as a separate dimension important to retain. By mapping how the visualizations encoded uncertainty, we identified four approaches that varied in terms of explicitness and customization. This work contributes with two empirical taxonomies of uncertainty and it's corresponding coping strategies, as well as with the foundation of a research agenda for uncertainty visualization in the digital humanities. Our findings further the synergy among humanists and visualization researchers, and ultimately contribute to the development of more trustworthy, uncertainty-aware visualizations.

This study introduces Co-gnito, a participatory physicalization game that supports collaborative urban mental mapping through storytelling. Through Co-gnito we investigate gaming as a means to elicit subjective spatial experiences and to steer the synchronous construction of a physicalization that aligns and represents them. Co-gnito was evaluated during seven deployments by analyzing how 28 players mapped their spatial experiences of two university campuses. Our results indicate that storytelling as a gaming mechanic, guided and motivated the gradual addition of personal contributions towards a collective outcome, but its reward system did not nudge the mapping direction as expected. We also demonstrate how the shared construction process of a physicalization is influenced by how the data encoding scheme was negotiated, by the token physical affordances and by the game mechanics. We therefore believe that our core contributions, comprising of: 1) a working research prototype; 2) an augmentation of the physicalization pipeline towards collaborative settings; and 3) a set of reflective considerations, provide actionable knowledge on how to design participatory physicalizations in the future.

Overt redirection is a class of virtual reality locomotion that uses perceptible transformations to enable the user to naturally walk through a virtual environment larger than the physical tracking space. In this research, we propose Foldable Spaces, a novel redirection approach based on the idea of dynamically ‘folding’ the geometry of the virtual environment to reveal new locations depending on the trajectory of the virtual reality user. Based on this approach, we developed three distinct techniques for overt redirection: (1) Horizontal, which folds and reveals layers of virtual space like the pages in a book; (2) Vertical, which rotates virtual space towards the user along a vertical axis; and (3) Accordion, which corrugates and flattens virtual space to bring faraway places closer to the user. In a within-subjects user study, we compared our proposed foldable techniques against each other along with a similarly situated redirection technique, Stop & Reset. Our findings show that Accordion was the most well-received by participants in terms of providing a smooth, continuous, and ‘natural’ experience of walking that does not involve shifts in orientation and provides an overarching view through the virtual environment.

Responsive architecture envisions the built environment to adapt to the changing needs of its occupants dynamically. Although it is increasingly feasible to move space-defining objects like room dividers by mobile robots, little is known about how or when such spatial adaptations should occur. We therefore measured the experience of 26 occupants while they performed six different activities inside an office breakout room that was being adapted by a robotically moving wall in either a reactive or proactive way. Based on these empirical findings, we propose how autonomous spatial adaptation should primarily aim to balance the spatial, situational and subjective qualities of the resulting sense of place. We also define eight distinct design recommendations that exploit the unique affordances of spatial adaptation. By asserting that future advances in human-building interaction (HBI) should be based on creating appropriate places rather than controlling functional spaces, we foresee how responsive architecture might become as compelling as its static counterpart.

While we know that the visualization of quantifiable uncertainty impacts the confidence in insights, little is known about whether the same is true for uncertainty that originates from aspects so inherent to the data that they can only be accounted for qualitatively. Being embedded within an archaeological project, we realized how assessing such qualitative uncertainty is crucial in gaining a holistic and accurate understanding of regional spatio-temporal patterns of human settlements over millennia. We therefore investigated the impact of visualizing qualitative implicit errors on the sense-making process via a probe that deliberately represented three distinct implicit errors, i.e., differing collection methods, subjectivity of data interpretations and assumptions on temporal continuity. By analyzing the interactions of 14 archaeologists with different levels of domain expertise, we discovered that novices became more actively aware of typically overlooked data issues and domain experts became more confident of the visualization itself. We observed how participants quoted social factors to alleviate some uncertainty, while in order to minimize it they requested additional contextual breadth or depth of the data. While our visualization did not alleviate all uncertainty, we recognized how it sparked reflective meta-insights regarding methodological directions of the data. We believe our findings inform future visualizations on how to handle the complexity of implicit errors for a range of user typologies and for highly data-critical application domains such as the digital humanities.

The vision of responsive architecture predicts that human experience can be evoked through the dynamic orchestration of space-defining elements. Whereas recent studies have robotically actuated furniture for functional goals, little is known how this capability can be deployed meaningfully on an architectural scale. We thus evaluated the spatial impact of a responsive wall on the inhabitants of ordinary apartments. To maintain safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a novel remote, semi-immersive cross-reality simulation evaluation methodology. Based on the orchestration of three space-defining operations, we define a theoretical framework that suggests how the position of a responsive wall can be determined through five distinct architectural qualities. This framework thus proposes how human-building interaction (HBI) could complement its functional goals with augmenting the well-being of occupants in the physical as well as the virtual realm.

Abstract Popular sports tracking applications allow athletes to share and compare their personal performance data with others. Visualizing this data in relevant public settings can be beneficial in provoking novel types of opportunistic and communal sense‐making. We investigated this premise by situating an analytical visualization of running performances on two touch‐enabled public displays in proximity to a local community running trail. Using a rich mixed‐method evaluation protocol during a three‐week‐long in‐the‐wild deployment, we captured its social and analytical impact across 235 distinct interaction sessions. Our results show how our public analytical visualization supported passers‐by to create novel insights that were rather of casual nature. Several textual features that surrounded the visualization, such as titles that were framed as provocative hypotheses and predefined attention‐grabbing data queries, sparked interest and social debate, while a narrative tutorial facilitated more analytical interaction patterns. Our detailed mixed‐methods evaluation approach led to a set of actionable takeaways for public visualizations that allow novice audiences to engage with data analytical insights that have local relevance.

Information visualization (infovis) is a powerful tool for exploring rich datasets. Within humanistic research, rich qualitative data and domain culture make traditional infovis approaches appear reductive and disconnected, leading to low adoption. In this paper, we use a multi-step approach to scrutinize the relationship between infovis and the humanities and suggest new directions for it. We first look into infovis from the humanistic perspective by exploring the humanistic literature around infovis. We validate and expand those findings though a co-design workshop with humanist and infovis experts. Then, we translate our findings into guidelines for designers and conduct a design critique exercise to explore their effect on the perception of humanist researchers. Based on these steps, we introduce Layers of Meaning, a framework to reduce the semantic distance between humanist researchers and visualizations of their research material, by grounding infovis tools in time and space, physicality, terminology, nuance, and provenance.

Novel social, civic or entertainment opportunities might emerge when spatially distributed public displays become interlinked in meaningful ways. Yet little is still known about the effect of intrinsic design dimensions, such as how multiple displays should be spatially arranged, how their content should be linked, and how their locations and content should dynamically change over time. We therefore conducted a two-month long design study of a distributed public display system that invited passers-by to answer hyperlocal questions. By comparing the performance of different content and location arrangement strategies, we reveal distinct spatiotemporal user engagement patterns, and the specific local conditions that shaped them. We also discovered several contextual factors that inhibit more widescale engagement, among which the conceptual novelty, the apparent purpose, and the perceived cumulative effort to engage with several displays. Consequently, this study provides insights on how public displays can be linked to augment the effects of distribution.

Public displays are increasingly deployed to make civic data easily and publicly consumable. While augmenting such public visualizations with a narrative design strategy could be promising to engage a lay audience, they might perform differently on public displays than on common online media because of the more context-sensitive environment. We therefore report on a comparative in-the-wild study of a public display that contrasts an identical public visualization with and without a narrative structure, and unravel how this affects the user engagement and insight creation process. Our findings indicate how a narrative strategy in relation to contextual aspects supports deeper, more personal reflection on data, connects authorship to the surrounding environment, and overcomes comprehension issues. We believe these results are useful for making public visualizations more effective, as well as understanding why and how lay users interact with and learn from narrative data visualization in general.

The in-the-wild methodology involves the evaluation of a functioning prototype in an everyday context, during which the participants are typically left unaware of the actual study context. As the material dimensions of such a prototype imply a preliminary status, the apparent difference between prototype and the final end product might affect the actual ecological validity of the evaluation results. By replicating an in-the-wild study of an identical yet progressed high fidelity prototype versus its research product one year apart, we aim to investigate the impact of material dimensions on user behavior. Our results demonstrate how impermanent material dimensions tend to increase the participation rate and augments reflection on ownership; imperfect dimensions reduce the expectations and contextual appropriation of an installation; and incomplete dimensions imply a relationship with the investigator. We thus claim that material dimensions affect the evaluation outcomes of in-the-wild evaluation studies.

Built heritage objects possess multiple types of information, varying from simple, factual aspects to more complex qualitative information and values, such as the architectural qualities, the construction techniques, or symbolic meanings of monuments. This qualitative information is relatively difficult to communicate using the conventional ways like museum labels or audio guides. Nonetheless, tangible interaction is a promising paradigm for communicating tacit information, its qualities have been demonstrated in a wide range of applications in different realms. Therefore, this study investigates how tangible interaction can enable the communication of qualitative information of built heritage to lay visitors. The main objectives of this study are communicating tacit and architectural qualities of built heritage in a physical form, investigating the effect of tangible interaction on social interaction among heritage visitors, and enhancing visitors' in-situ experience of built heritage or 1:1 replicas. Our early findings indicate the capability of tangible interaction for engaging museum visitors to accomplish additional endeavors, and facilitating their understanding of cultural values and architectural qualities of built heritage.

In HCI, the honeypot effect describes how people interacting with a system passively stimulate passers-by to observe, approach and engage in an interaction. Previous research has revealed the successive engagement phases and zones of the honeypot effect. However, there is little insight into: 1) how people are stimulated to transition between phases; 2) what aspects drive the honeypot effect apart from watching others; and 3) what constraints affect its self-reinforcing performance. In this paper, we discuss the honeypot effect as a spatiotemporal model of trajectories and influences. We introduce the Honeypot Model based on the analysis of observations and interaction logs from Encounters, a public installation that interactively translated bodily movements into a dynamic visual and sonic output. In providing a model that describes trajectories and influences of audience engagement in public interactive systems, our paper seeks to inform researchers and designers to consider contextual, spatial and social factors that influence audience engagement.

As cycling is increasingly promoted as an environment-friendly, cheap and even fast alternative, there exists an increasing need to civically involve the potentially engaged and opinionated user group of cyclists. Therefore, we designed and evaluated Bicycle Barometer, an interactive bicycle count display that gathers the opinions from cyclists and conveys real-time, multi-dimensional data to them regarding cycling behavior. Our user-centered design process focused on optimizing the user experience by comparing several alternative cyclist-specific interaction designs, which resulted in the combination of a pressure sensitive floor mat, push button and low-resolution LED display. An in-the-wild evaluation study resulted in a set of design recommendations for cyclist-specific interaction, providing concrete insights into how a specifically targeted interaction method for public display is able to afford engagement and enthusiasm from a particular target audience.

Humans have represented data in many forms for thousands of years, yet the main sensory channel we use to perceive these representations today still remains largely exclusive to sight. Recent developments, such as advances in digital fabrication, microcontrollers, actuated tangibles, and shape-changing interfaces offer new opportunities to encode data in physical forms and have stimulated the emergence of 'Data Physicalization' as a research area.

In this paper, we investigate the potential of controlled in-the-wild studies as an evaluation methodology that merges the benefits of lab-based and in-the-wild studies. Our exploratory investigation builds upon a comparative, between subject experiment benchmarking different interaction features of a custom public installation that visualized a series of urban datasets. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the in-the-wild versus the controlled in-the-wild methodologies, we compared the resulting findings in terms of participant engagement, insight generation, and social interaction. We propose that a controlled in-the-wild study offers a viable alternative when evaluating more complex interaction methods in public space, hereby potentially reducing the practical efforts of in-the-wild studies to involve participants.

Due to recent technical developments, urban systems generate large and complex data sets. While visualizations have been used to make these accessible, often they are tailored to one specific group of users, typically the public or expert users. We present Touching Transport, an application that allows a diverse group of users to visually explore public transit data on a multi-touch tabletop. It provides multiple perspectives of the data and consists of three visualization modes conveying tempo-spatial patterns as map, time-series, and arc view. We exhibited our system publicly, and evaluated it in a lab study with three distinct user groups: citizens with knowledge of the local environment, experts in the domain of public transport, and non-experts with neither local nor domain knowledge. Our observations and evaluation results show we achieved our goals of both attracting visitors to explore the data while enabling gathering insights for both citizens and experts. We discuss the design considerations in developing our system, and describe our lessons learned in designing engaging tabletop visualizations.

As information technology is increasingly embedded in our cities, opportunities arise to design novel applications that benefit urban communities. We describe the design and evaluation of ZWERM (Dutch for the term 'swarm'), a public game that was specifically designed for augmenting community participation in urban neighborhoods. A network of ten components has been designed, some of which had different interfaces and design approaches: from totem-like Trees for gathering around with RFID cards to playful Sparrows that react on whistle sounds. After implementing the urban game in two city neighborhoods, we investigated the impact of each of these components on their communities. Our insights are useful for the public interaction design of future urban, interactive networks that aim to positively influence community participation and social cohesion.

We present the design and evaluation of MyPosition, a public display in the form of a large projection, featuring an interactive poll visualization. MyPosition aims at facilitating the deliberation and comparison of individual opinions on locally relevant topics in an opportunistic and engaging way. We evaluated MyPosition in an in-the-wild study and demonstrated that the engaging nature of the installation was effective in enticing public discussion. We found that (i) the increased identifiability of users positively impacted the engagement with and the social debate around the installation, however lowered the actual polling rate; (ii) people submitted their personal opinion instead of playing around with the interactive features; and (iii) the display led to considerable discussion as well as nudging among people, in particular in zones beyond the interaction area in front of the screen.

Public displays and projections are becoming increasingly available in various informal urban settings. However, their potential impact on informing and engaging citizens on relevant issues has still been largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that visualizations displayed in public settings are able to increase social awareness and discourse by exposing underlying patterns in data that is submitted by citizens. We thus introduce the design and evaluation of Reveal-it!, a public, interactive projection that facilitates the comparison of the energy consumptions of individuals and communities. Our in-the-wild deployment in three distinct physical locations provided insights into: 1) how people responded to this form of display in different contexts; 2) how it influenced people's perception and discussion of individual and communal data; and 3) the implications for a public visualization as a tool for increasing awareness and discourse. We conclude by discussing emerging participant behaviors, as well as some challenges involved in facilitating a socially motivated crowd-sourced visualization in the public context.

SUMMARY: TrioVis is a visual analytics tool developed for filtering on coverage and variant frequency for genomic variants from exome sequencing of parent-child trios. In TrioVis, the variant data are organized by grouping each variant based on the laws of Mendelian inheritance. Taking three Variant Call Format files as input, TrioVis allows the user to test different coverage thresholds (i.e. different levels of stringency), to find the optimal threshold values tailored to their hypotheses and to gain insights into the global effects of filtering through interaction. AVAILABILITY: Executables, source code and sample data are available at https://bitbucket.org/biovizleuven/triovis. Screencast is available at http://vimeo.com/user6757771/triovis. CONTACT: [email protected].

The network effects of the digital age have made it easier for individuals to collaborate with others to produce meaningful content from the bottom up. Architectural and urban design could benefit from these new forms of distributed collaboration, since they have the potential to introduce a wealth of knowledge and creativity in the design process. In this paper, we present a prototype online platform called 'ArchiBrain' that is built around a 'project-tree' visualization of individual design contributions, which provides participants with a structured overview of the design process they are collaborating in. Our evaluation study provides the first indications that this visualization platform is able to increase the intrinsic motivation for designers to contribute in a collaborative manner, provides a clear overview over the design process, and can help directing collaborative efforts by highlighting the most popular design proposals.

This paper reports on a between-subject, comparative online study of three information visualization demonstrators that each displayed the same dataset by way of an identical scatterplot technique, yet were different in style in terms of visual and interactive embellishment. We validated stylistic adherence and integrity through a separate experiment in which a small cohort of participants assigned our three demonstrators to predefined groups of stylistic examples, after which they described the styles with their own words. From the online study, we discovered significant differences in how participants execute specific interaction operations, and the types of insights that followed from them. However, in spite of significant differences in apparent usability, enjoyability and usefulness between the style demonstrators, no variation was found on the self-reported depth, expert-rated depth, confidence or difficulty of the resulting insights. Three different methods of insight analysis have been applied, revealing how style impacts the creation of insights, ranging from higher-level pattern seeking to a more reflective and interpretative engagement with content, which is what underlies the patterns. As this study only forms the first step in determining how the impact of style in information visualization could be best evaluated, we propose several guidelines and tips on how to gather, compare and categorize insights through an online evaluation study, particularly in terms of analyzing the concise, yet wide variety of insights and observations in a trustworthy and reproducable manner.

This study investigates the impact of revealing the changes in daily residential energy consumption of individual households on their respective house faç ades. While energy feedback devices are now commercially available, still little is known about the potential of making such private information publicly available in order to encourage various forms of social involvement, such as peer pressure or healthy competition. This paper reports on the design rationale of a custom-made chalkboard that conveys different visualizations of household energy consumption, which were updated daily by hand. An in-situ, between-subject study was conducted during which the effects of such a public display were compared with two different control groups over a total period of 7 weeks. The competitive aspects of the public display led to more sustained behavior change and more effective energy conservation, as some graphical depictions such as a historical line graph raised awareness about consumption behavior, and the public character of the display prompted discussions in the wider community. The paper concludes with several considerations for the design of public displays, and of household energy consumption in particular.

This paper collates eight expert opinions about Knowledge Visualization, what it is and what it should be. An average of 581 words long, topics span from representation, storytelling and criticizing the lack of theory, to communication, analytics for the masses and reasoning, to trendy Visual Thinking and creativity beyond PowerPoint. These individual views provide a picture of the present and the future of a discipline that could not be more timely, aiming for a common understanding of the visualization of knowledge.

Some visualizations need not only adequately represent information; their presentation needs also to be effective, leading to a behavior change in the viewer. Rhetorical figures, like metaphors, are said to increase the effectiveness of a message. This position paper first reviews the literature on why metaphors are more persuasive. Second, it presents four distinct meaning creation operations as one dimension of a future classification system. Third, it explains the properties of the meaning creation operations on four state-of-the-art works from infographics. Fourth, it presents an analysis of published empirical studies from the field of advertising, and provides advice on how to best use them in practice.

This paper consists of a review of contemporary methods that map and materialize abstract data as physical artifacts. With computing technology and the access of information influencing every aspect of our everyday lives, one can question the current habit of information displays to dasiasimulatepsila real world metaphors, and whether information could instead be conveyed by approximating the analogue and tangible characteristics of our daily experiences. This paper introduces five different degrees of dasiadata physicalitypsila, which differ in the level of abstraction of how data is mapped and perceived by human senses: ambient display, pixel sculptures, object augmentation, data sculptures and alternative modality. This categorization demonstrates the potential of information visualization as a communication medium in its own right, which proliferates beyond the ubiquitous pixel-based, light-emitting surfaces of today.

In this paper we suggest the ceiling as a new physical surface for information visualization. To provide a design framework for application designers, we present the notion of 'information sky'. This concept is based on (1) the metaphor of the natural sky, (2) historical examples of ceiling art and (3) recent computing paradigms, including mediatecture, ubiquitous computing and ambient display. We further introduce three distinct categories that denote potential application domains for ceiling-based data visualizations. Finally, we present four different application scenarios we have developed using prototyping and user-centered design techniques, and discuss how they relate to the categories.

Aesthetic seems currently under represented in most current data visualization evaluation methodologies. This paper investigates the results of an online survey of 285 participants, measuring both perceived aesthetic as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of retrieval tasks across a set of 11 different data visualization techniques. The data visualizations represent an identical hierarchical dataset, which has been normalized in terms of color, typography and layout balance. This study measured parameters such as speed of completion, accuracy rate, task abandonment and latency of erroneous response. Our findings demonstrate a correlation between latency in task abandonment and erroneous response time in relation to visualization's perceived aesthetic. These results support the need for an increased recognition for aesthetic in the typical evaluation process of data visualization techniques.

This paper proposes a model of information aesthetics in the context of information visualization. It addresses the need to acknowledge a recently emerging number of visualization projects that combine information visualization techniques with principles of creative design. The proposed model contributes to a better understanding of information aesthetics as a potentially independent research field within visualization that specifically focuses on the experience of aesthetics, dataset interpretation and interaction. The proposed model is based on analysing existing visualization techniques by their interpretative intent and data mapping inspiration. It reveals information aesthetics as the conceptual link between information visualization and visualization art, and includes the fields of social and ambient visualization. This model is unique in its focus on aesthetics as the artistic influence on the technical implementation and intended purpose of a visualization technique, rather than subjective aesthetic judgments of the visualization outcome. This research provides a framework for understanding aesthetics in visualization, and allows for new design guidelines and reviewing criteria.

This paper proposes a conceptual model for which one might begin to assess aesthetic effect within the user experience of information visualization. Through first defining, then illustrating new dimensions of aesthetic that exist within the context of information visualization, this paper goes on to suggest that a user centered evaluation method not solely centered around task efficiency metrics is now imperative

This paper proposes a novel data clustering algorithm, coined 'cellular ants', which combines principles of cellular automata and ant colony optimization algorithms to group similar multidimensional data objects within a two-dimensional grid. The proposed method assigns data objects to unique ants, which actively move around, leave pheromones and follow trails of similar ants. Cellular automata principles based on simple, discrete neighborhood densities determine an ant's directional movements, so that clusters emerge. The novel concept of 'positional swapping' organizes these clusters internally based on multi-dimensional data value similarity. As a result, shared cluster borders in grid space contain data objects that are nearby in parameter space. This method is algorithmically simple, as it is based on a few user-chosen variables and uses fixed discrete values instead of probability algorithms. This clustering technique is evaluated using several datasets, while its methodology and computational performance is compared to similar approaches.

Musicians in training need to understand the sound they are producing in order to improve its deficient aspects. Verbal feedback from musical masters is the usual method used for attaining this understanding. However, using realtime sound visualisation as a complementary form of feedback allows the large amounts of data typical of real-time acoustic analysis to be employed within training. This improves the efficiency of the feedback loop normally present within musical training and pedagogy. The implementation and effect of such a system is discussed.

This work presents a significant extension of the information flocking concept and algorithms originally presented by G. Proctor and C. Winter (1998). It introduces a novel way of visualizing time-varying datasets using the emergent characteristics of self organization and dynamic behavior simulation. The current prototype uses both spatial clustering and behavioral animation to represent temporal data similarities by simulating the time-varying evolution of dynamic datasets. Instead of presenting exact data values, the way how the data values change over time is being visualized. In addition, the current information flocking method is capable of visualizing short-term temporal events or long-term time-varying data evolutions by automatically generating different recognizable motion typologies. This research show how artificial life principles have been merged with the field of information visualization. Several aspects of the original information flocking algorithms have been improved to incorporate the real-time evaluation of continuous dynamic data value streams and to generate multiple stable, recognizable atomic as well as collective dynamic behaviors that reflect time-varying dataset changes and relative data value evolutions. The main information flocking principles are demonstrated through a visualization of historical stock market quotes.

We present blue-c , a new immersive projection and 3D video acquisition environment for virtual design and collaboration. It combines simultaneous acquisition of multiple live video streams with advanced 3D projection technology in a CAVE™-like environment, creating the impression of total immersion. The blue-c portal currently consists of three rectangular projection screens that are built from glass panels containing liquid crystal layers. These screens can be switched from a whitish opaque state (for projection) to a transparent state (for acquisition), which allows the video cameras to "look through" the walls. Our projection technology is based on active stereo using two LCD projectors per screen. The projectors are synchronously shuttered along with the screens, the stereo glasses, active illumination devices, and the acquisition hardware. From multiple video streams, we compute a 3D video representation of the user in real time. The resulting video inlays are integrated into a networked virtual environment. Our design is highly scalable, enabling blue-c to connect to portals with less sophisticated hardware.

This paper introduces an immersive virtual reality application that allows users to browse and explore the contents of database systems. We have implemented a visualization metaphor that is based upon the intrinsic characteristics of particles, coined 'infolicles', which are used as representations of data objects. Users are able to interact with the dynamic, three-dimensional visualization by manipulating forces and surfaces. These tools, representing respectively user interests and data filters, influence the collection of infolicles according to the rules of Newtonian mechanics. Informational values are expressed through the presence of both dynamic and static characteristics such as motion, directionality, and form. We demonstrate these principles through a prototype that uses our university's financial budget data.