Sandy Claes

Street infographics : raising awareness of local issues through a situated urban visualization

This paper presents the evaluation study of Street Infographics, an urban intervention that visually represent data that is contextually related to local issues, and is visualized through situated displays that are placed within the social and public context of an urban environment. Based on the design characteristics of urban visualization, we defined six specific design principles and applied these in the deployment of a low-fidelity prototype during an in-the-wild study. Designed to augment an existing street sign with socially- and locally-relevant information, the resulting urban visualization encourages people to gain local knowledge, reflect on their perception and even foster social interaction. We describe the design of Street Infographics and its effect on local residents, as measured before and after our intervention. Our case study should be considered one of the first steps towards a better understanding of the true potential of the use of data visualization in a public context, such as for engaging citizens in acting towards a more qualitative and sustainable neighborhood.

The Role of Tangible Interaction in Exploring Information on Public Visualization Displays

A rising number of public displays are becoming equipped with tangible interfaces. Especially in the context of the visualization of data in the public realm, offering tangible interaction modalities might actively attract and engage passer-bys, and lead to increased information discovery.. We therefore present a novel public visualization installation that deploys different forms of tangible interaction in combination with a public display in order to communicate civic data to a lay audience. During a comparative, deployment-based study in an urban context, we compared three distinct tangible interaction modalities in terms of the types of engagement and insight generation they facilitated. We report on our findings and discuss a number of design recommendations for tangible interaction on public information displays.

Visualising things. Perspectives on how to make things public through visualisation

In this paper, we will be discussing how visualisations can facilitate participatory processes by way of conveying issues of public concern as ‘things’. In the line of Latour’s plea to ‘make things public’, visualisations can be purposefully designed to trigger and encourage public debates concerning a wide range of issues. For this, we explore how a visualisation can be both transparent (i.e. visualising the complex entanglement of backstories of an issue) and readable. Specifically, we clarify the aspect of designing a readable visualisation of ‘things’. First, drawing from different fields of literature (i.e. Information Visualisation, Science and Technology Studies and Human-Computer-Interaction) we will articulate three main aspects of readability: engaging people to interact with a visualisation of complex issues, supporting sense making and encouraging reflection. Then, based on three empirical case studies, we indicate different design considerations in terms of engaging people to interact with a visualisation: contextualising a visualisation (via its location or medium), staging interaction and allowing people to provide their own perspective on the issue displayed. As a conclusion we propose a scenario that allows the visualisation to gradually become more transparent in support of its readability.

Controlling In-the-Wild Evaluation Studies of Public Displays

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.

The Bicycle Barometer: Design and Evaluation of Cyclist-Specific Interaction for a Public Display

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.

What Public Visualization Can Learn from Street Art

As public visualization is becoming increasingly popular, our physical environment should be considered an intrinsic component of its design because of the various rich, interpretative meanings that it inherently possesses. As many concepts of street art deliberately deploy such meanings within the environment in order to convey particular messages, the authors believe it can act as a valuable resource for public visualization design. The authors thus discuss four distinct rhetoric strategies to demonstrate how street art practices can relate to their environment and how these relationships can trigger critical reflection for public visualization.

The Impact of a Narrative Design Strategy for Information Visualization on a Public Display

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.

Design Implications of Casual Health Visualization on Tangible Displays

This paper reports on a case study that investigated the potential of tangible displays as a means to communicate data-driven facts to lay people. We developed an interactive application that communicated health-related correlations on a set of Sifteo displays, and compared it to a traditional screen-based graphical interface conveying identical information. Our user experience and insight analysis study showed that the tangible interface allowed for more personal, reflective insights, whereas the graphical user interface was considered more efficient in time. These findings were confirmed during an in-the-wild observation study in a hospital waiting room. We therefore formulated a set of design implications for the future interaction design of casual, tangible visualizations on small screens.

Conveying a civic issue through data via spatially distributed public visualization and polling displays.

The proliferation of Internet-of-Things devices in urban environments empower citizens to appropriate data for civic purposes. Simultaneously, public visualization has shown to engage a wide audience with data by situating its graphical representation within the actual environment of its measurements. We thus propose a public visualization and polling system that enables residents to co-author a civically-motivated data-driven narrative and distribute it over multiple wireless displays located at different physical locations. Through an in-the-wild study, we studied how passers-by and residents engaged with the system by applying a user engagement evaluation model that maps the social and spatio-temporal context into interactions between the content, the environment and the infrastructure and two distinct user types, i.e. the residents who hosted the displays and the passers-by. Our findings show how the tacit social relationships between the user types, the social factors between passers-by, various temporal aspects, and several contextual factors affect user engagement with our spatially distributed public visualization and polling displays.

Empowering Citizens with Spatially Distributed Public Visualization Displays

We present the design process of Like to Display, which is a Do-it-yourself public visualization kit that can be spatially distributed, which empowers citizens to display a concern. The kit includes a range of small, wireless e-ink displays that allow citizens to distribute and collect data in the public space surrounding their home. An accompanying online platform supports citizens to select related data and an appropriate visualization format. In this work-in-progress, we discuss the co-design and the development of the toolkit, in which we focus where and what types of data citizens want to display. We also report on a small case study with shopkeepers in which we further explore this focus.