Data craft: integrating data into daily practices and shared reflections

We explore data craft as a means to create mementos that integrate data about personal and shared experiences into people’s everyday lives. Digital mementos, e.g., in form of visualizations, aim to support personal and joint reminiscing by leveraging personal data archives. However, their digital nature can complicate value construction and integration with social and everyday practices. We propose to consider data craft—the manual crafting of functional objects that incorporate personal visualizations—as an opportunity to create meaningful physical objects. We suggest that the manual creation and habitual use of these objects adds to their perceived value and authenticity and can spark recollection based on digital traces of personal and shared experiences. We illustrate the concept of data craft through examples and reflect on the resulting objects as keepsakes and gifts that strengthen social relationships.PostprintPeer reviewe

Self-reflection and personal physicalization construction

Self-reflection is a central goal of personal informatics systems, and constructing visualizations from physical tokens has been found to help people reflect on data. However, so far, constructive physicalization has only been studied in lab environments with provided datasets. Our qualitative study investigates the construction of personal physicalizations in people's domestic environments over 2-4 weeks. It contributes an understanding of (1) the process of creating personal physicalizations, (2) the types of personal insights facilitated, (3) the integration of self-reflection in the physicalization process, and (4) its benefits and challenges for self-reflection. We found that in constructive personal physicalization, data collection, construction and self-reflections are deeply intertwined. This extends previous models of visualization creation and data-driven self-reflection. We outline how benefits such as reflection through manual construction, personalization, and presence in everyday life can be transferred to a wider set of digital and physical systems.Postprin

A Change of Perspective: How User Orientation Influences the Perception of Physicalizations

As physicalizations encode data in their physical 3D form, the orientation in which the user is viewing the physicalization may impact the way the information is perceived. However, this relation between user orientation and perception of physical properties is not well understood or studied. To investigate this relation, we conducted an experimental study with 20 participants who viewed 6 exemplars of physicalizations from 4 different perspectives. Our findings show that perception is directly influenced by user orientation as it affects (i) the number and type of clusters, (ii) anomalies and (iii) extreme values identified within a physicalization. Our results highlight the complexity and variability of the relation between user orientation and perception of physicalizations

The visual and beyond : characterizing experiences with auditory, haptic and visual data representations

Research in sonification and physicalization have expanded data representation techniques to include senses beyond the visual. Yet, little is known of how people interpret and make sense of haptic and sonic compared to visual representations. We have conducted two phenomenologically oriented comparative studies (applying the Repertory Grid and the Microphenomenological interview technique) to gather in-depth accounts of people's interpretation and experience of different representational modalities that included auditory, haptic and visual variations . Our findings show a rich characterization of these different representational modalities: our visually oriented representations engage through their familiarity, accuracy and easy interpretation, while our representations that stimulated auditory and haptic interpretation were experienced as more ambiguous, yet stimulated an engaging interpretation of data that involved the whole body. We describe and discuss in detail participants' processes of making sense and generating meaning using the modalities' unique characteristics, individually and as a group. Our research informs future research in the area of multimodal data representations from both a design and methodological perspective.Postprin

Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, AVI '20, September 28-October 2, 2020, Salerno, Italy 2020 Association for Computing Machiner

The Bohemian Bookshelf : supporting serendipitous book discoveries through information visualization

Serendipity, a trigger of exciting yet unexpected discoveries, is an important but comparatively neglected factor in information seeking, research, and ideation. We suggest that serendipity can be facilitated through visualization. To explore this, we introduce the Bohemian Bookshelf, which aims to support serendipitous discoveries in the context of digital book collections. The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five interlinked visualizations each offering a unique overview of the collection. It aims at encouraging serendipity by (1) offering multiple visual access points to the collection, (2) highlighting adjacencies between books, (3) providing flexible visual pathways for exploring the collection, (4) enticing curiosity through abstract, metaphorical, and visually distinct representations of books, and (5) enabling a playful approach to information exploration. A deployment at a library revealed that visitors embraced this approach of utilizing visualization to support open-ended explorations and serendipitous discoveries. This encourages future explorations into promoting serendipity through information visualization.Postprin

The Bohemian Bookshelf : supporting serendipitous discoveries through visualization

Serendipity, a trigger of exciting discoveries when we least expect it, is currently being discussed as an often neglected but still important factor in information seeking processes, research, and ideation. In this paper we explore serendipity as an information visualization goal. In particular, we introduce the Bohemian Bookshelf visualization that aims to support serendipitous exploration of digital book collections. The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five interlinked visualizations, each representing a unique (over)view of the collection. It facilitates serendipitous discoveries by (1) offering multiple access points by providing visualizations of different perspectives on the book collection, (2) enticing curiosity through abstract, metaphorical, and visually distinct representations of the collection, (3) highlighting alternate adjacencies between books, (4) providing multiple pathways for exploring the data collection in a flexible way, (5) supporting immediate previews of books, and (6) enabling a playful approach to information exploration. Our design goals and their exploration through the Bohemian Bookshelf visualization opens up a discussion on how to promote serendipity through information visualization.Postprin

Visualizations for Personal Reflection and Expression

Research on visualizations of our growing personal data collections thus far has been predominantly geared towards behaviour-change. However, this focus may have overlooked opportunities for other meaningful ways to relate to personal data. People engage in a variety of activities to foster self-understanding, identity development, and strengthen their relationships. Such practices include writing diaries, connecting to others through personal stories, and collecting reminders of important accomplishments, events, and relationships. These forms of self-reflection, reminiscing, and self-expression can help us experience our lives as meaningful. The potential of visualizations for ``amplifying cognition'' and communicating data make them a promising means for supporting a wider range of self-reflective and expressive practices that have so far been little explored in visualization. In this thesis, I study the potential of visualizations of personal data for self-reflection and expression. As part of this research, I derive conceptual considerations for personal visualizations from research on everyday narrative practices, autobiographical memory, and the use of mementos. By relating and applying findings from these areas to visualization, I contribute design considerations for visualizations that support personal expression and reflection. I further explore example visualization approaches that address these design considerations. I contribute a visualization technique for reminiscing, and a system that allows people to create, reflect on, and share visualization mementos. I further describe a paradigm and construction kit that allow people without prior visualization, design or programming skills to construct personal visualizations. Finally, I present findings from qualitative studies that explore how individuals create and use visualizations for personal reflection and expression. The first investigation explores techniques for conveying subjective perspectives based on an analysis of narrative visualizations. The second study focuses on people's experiences with creating visualization mementos. The last study examines how people construct and reflect on personal visualizations in their domestic environment. These investigations allow me to validate and refine the proposed design considerations, evaluate the developed visualization approaches and point to interesting directions for future research. I hope that this research will contribute to the development of visualizations that encourage individual meaning-making with personal data by supporting diverse reflective and expressive practices