Visualizing Perspectives for Creative Collaboration

Every day, more and more data is collected, and we are increasingly being provided with open access to it. The hope is that this will be the driving force behind a wave of innovative new businesses that are able to lead us out of our current financial problems and give rise to a generation of better informed, active consumers who will engage with the kind of changes necessary to reduce global warming and prevent a pensions crisis. However it is not enough to simply release this data, people must also be given the tools to understand and engage with it creatively. The research presented here draws together current approaches from data visualization, creativity research and human-computer interaction to provide a framework in which personal data stories can be used to present a range of perspectives and support collaboration between people with different experiences and varying levels of domain expertise

Narrative Visualization: Sharing Insights into Complex Data

This paper is a reflection on the emerging genre of narrative visualization, a creative response to the need to share complex data engagingly with the public. In it, we explain how narrative visualization offers authors the opportunity to communicate more effectively with their audience by reproducing and sharing an experience of insight similar to their own. To do so, we propose a two part model, derived from previous literature, in which insight is understood as both an experience and also the product of that experience. We then discuss how the design of narrative visualization should be informed by attempts elsewhere to track the provenance of insights and share them in a collaborative setting. Finally, we present a future direction for research that includes using EEG technology to record neurological patterns during episodes of insight experience as the basis for evaluation

Inspired by information: combining data visualization and generative techniques in early stage design research

The growth in online services and ubiquitous computing has resulted in organizations holding large amounts of valuable data. The technical and monetary barriers to reusing these data for new products or services are relatively low. To be successful however, such products or services require a potentially radical re-framing so that these data acquire new meaning. In addition, the contexts surrounding these data present all the difficulties associated with ‘wicked problems’. In this paper I will outline research investigating how we might utilize generative design methods, creativity techniques and information visualization to address some of the challenges in this design space. These challenges include the need to better understand what these data mean at present, how the context they come from is experienced and what these data could potentially do or mean in future. This will be illustrated with the work undertaken in two case studies

Open Access: Getting on the Same Page: What if IR Managers and OA Policy Administrators Could Have Everything They Desire From Publishers?

Directors of scholarly communication and others responsible for institutional policies with regard to repositories and open access have an increasingly complex landscape to manage. University presses, even those with a strong support for open access, often have subscription journals. Are there areas where these subscription journals can follow OA-friendly practices that can help the IR managers and OA policy administrators? If so, maybe these can be practices that other journal publishers can be pressured to provide? We bring together three panelists from research universities with diverse responsibilities of administering an open access policy, managing an institutional repository, and managing journal publishing to discuss what features and terms can reasonably be expected of publishers to support open access. Topics at this Lively Lunch and discussion include: What can publishers do to simplify the administration of IRs? What terms could be clarified so that authors who share their submitted manuscripts can do so with confidence that they are not afoul of publisher restrictions? What terms should cover data so that universities can archive not just articles but sufficient data to allow independent review and evaluation of research results

Maximum Dissemination: A possible model for society journals in the humanities and social sciences to support Open while retaining their subscription revenue

It is well recognized that one of the hardest problems in the Open Access arena is how to ‘flip’ the flagship society journals in the humanities and social sciences. Their revenue from a flagship journal is critical to the scholarly society. On the one hand, it is true that the paywall which guards the subscription system from unauthorized access is marginalizing whole categories of scholars and learners. On the other hand, “flipping”to an APC based model simply marginalizes some of the same people and institutions on the authorship side. Various endowment or subsidy models of flipping create the idea of Samaritans and “freeloaders” which bring into question their sustainability. I propose re-thinking the relationship between publisher and author. The publisher should act as the experts in dissemination and should take on the responsibility of maximizing the dissemination of the author’s work by providing the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) to an appropriate repository and taking down the paywall. When requests for an article come to the publisher instead of presenting non-subscribers with a paywall, they instead direct the request to the repository in which the AAM has been archived. This walk-through of Maximum Dissemination is followed by: A statement from Princeton’s Professor Stanley Katz, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies A youtube video by Associate Professor of Sociology Smith Radhakrishnan which is attached to this submission, is available at http://youtu.be/sPO66vuTFJ0

Using Information Visualization to Support Creativity in Service Design Workshops

In this paper we outline ongoing PhD research in which we are exploring how information visualization can be used to make quantitative data more accessible and engaging to key stakeholder representatives during service design workshops. We also outline how such visualizations could be used in conjunction with applied creativity techniques to identify ideas for design requirements that are both novel and appropriate, and therefore considered creative. We illustrate this research with details of a workshop held with customers and staff of E.ON Energy in which the objective was to design new services that utilise the data generated by smart energy meters

Using data visualization in creativity workshops: a new tool in the designer's kit

Creativity workshops have proved effective in drawing out unexpected requirements and giving form to participants' novel ideas. Here, we introduce a new addition to the workshop designer's toolkit: interactive data visualization, used as stimuli to prompt insight and inspire creativity. We first describe a pilot study in which we compare the effectiveness of two different styles of data visualization. Here we found that a less ambiguous style was more effective in supporting idea generation. Following this, we report a case study in which we employ data visualization within a service design workshop, where participants gain insights that are later realized in design ideas