Data physicalizations have the potential for more natural, intuitive and embodied interactions with data that can engage people with data in a playful way compared to traditional screen and mouse-based interactions. Such interactions are useful to make data understandable and interesting to interact with, especially for special user groups such as children. In this research, we explored how direct manipulation of physical tangibles as an interaction method affects children’s engagement with data, the understanding of data and the overall child-data experience. We compared two new tangible manipulation-based interaction methods: TM-E (Tangible Manipulation Emptying) and TM-F (Tangible Manipulation Filling) designed to create more natural interactions with air quality data and compared them with a slider-based interaction. A user study (N=36) with young adolescents revealed that the newly introduced interaction methods were effective in conveying and recalling air quality information and were positively received by the participants. We also observed that the interaction metaphor impacts the overall user experience. These lessons learned are relevant to the design of physicalizations fostering public awareness, for example, in the context of sustainable development.

The availability of open data and of tools to create visualizations on top of these open datasets have led to an ever-growing amount of geovisualizations on the Web. There is thus an increasing need for techniques to make geovisualizations FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This article explores what it would mean for a geovisualization to be FAIR, presents relevant approaches to FAIR geovisualizations and lists open research questions on the road towards FAIR geovisualizations. The discussion is done using three complementary perspectives: the computer, which stores geovisualizations digitally; the analyst, who uses them for sensemaking; and the developer, who creates them. The framework for FAIR geovisualizations proposed, and the open questions identified are relevant to researchers working on findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable online visualizations of geographic information.

Citizen participation is an important part of urban planning but few people participate, and most frequently they can do so only passively. This can result in excluding many people and to urban designs not reflecting people’s wishes. In this paper, we explore the use of interactive, immersive public displays as facilitators for deeper participation in urban planning. We propose a novel approach that combines panoramic videos of locations with overlays depicting planned buildings. We evaluated it in a lab-based user study (N = 21), where participants used a simple mobile client for interacting with a prototypical implementation to vote/comment on urban planning proposals. Usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction were all rated highly by the participants. The pros and cons of the approach were further identified based on the analysis of the interview data. Overall, the results provide initial evidence that the approach succeeded in facilitating deeper participation.

Open government datasets (OGD) have been flooding the Web in recent years. Geovisualisations are the natural way of making sense of them, and have been gradually coming out. However, one key problem is the lack of flexibility of these visualizations, which severely limits their re-use in new scenarios. This article therefore proposes to increase the intelligence of existing geovisualisations by incorporating five features, to make better use of OGD: (i) automatic geographic data type recognition, (ii) generation of geovisualisation designs, (iii) monitoring of users' understanding of geographic facts, (iv) self-optimization, and (v) user activity recognition. In addition to benefiting users of OGD, realizing these features presents rich scientific challenges and opportunities for Geovisualization research, the OGD landscape (and beyond).

Participatory design (PD) in HCI has been successfully applied to vulnerable groups, but further research is still needed on forced migrants. We report on a month-long case study with a group of about 25 young forced migrants (YFMs), where we applied and adapted strategies from PD and participatory research (PR). We gained insights into the benefits and drawbacks of combining PD and PR concepts in this particular scenario. The PD+PR approach supported intercultural collaborations between YFMs and young members of the host community. It also enabled communication across language barriers by using visual and “didactic reduction” resources. On a theoretical level, the experiences we gained allowed us to reflect on the role of “safe spaces” for participation and the need for further discussing it in PD. Our results can benefit researchers who take part in technology-related participatory processes with YFMs.

While it is commonplace to retrieve photos showing a particular feature (e.g. through tools such as Google Pictures or Bing Images), spatial approaches for retrieving videos showing a particular feature (e.g. a building) have yet to be established. This article proposes five ranking algorithms to query georeferenced videos for a specific feature based on the videos' spatio-temporal metadata. 12 relevance criteria for feature-centric video ranking were compiled from a focus group discussion. From these, four criteria have been selected for implementation: "Feature Depiction", "Feature Illumination", "Feature Visibility Duration", and "Distance to Feature". These criteria were implemented in five algorithms and evaluated regarding efficiency and user perceived plausibility. The evaluation suggests that the "Feature Visibility Duration" of the video's viewshed with the queried feature geometry offers a good trade-off between computationally performant and cognitive plausible ranking. The obtained results are relevant to user-centered approaches for interacting with georeferenced videos.