Creating data visualizations in the physical world is not a new phenomenon. Humans have been drawing on walls, tallying money and crops, and carving on stone tablets for thousands of years. Today, though the practice of data visualization is largely done in the digital world, there is an exciting area of working in the physical space–the real world, as it were–to create, share, and communicate data and information. That brings us to the exciting new book, Making with Data, that provides a snapshot of the diverse practices contemporary creators are using to produce objects, spaces, and experiences imbued with data. In this week’s episode of the podcast, I chat with the editors of the book to get their take on this exciting field.
Dr. Samuel Huron is an information designer and associate professor in Design of Information Technologies in the Social and Economical Science department of Télécom Paris at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, and part of the CNRS Institut Interdisciplinaire de l’Innovation. His research addresses how humans create visual and physical representations of abstract information to think, collaborate, learn, analyze, explore, and design new data representations, systems and information artefacts. He leads the design studio at Telecom Paris and he is part of the Interact and Diva teams. He worked as the lead designer of the research institute of the Pompidou Center. His approach is grounded in fifteen years of experience in interactive media industries where he worked with a broad range of civic, cultural, and corporate clients. Prior to his research career, he worked in new media art with projects including video art labels on art installations, video mixing, and live performances. For his PhD on Constructive Visualization he was awarded the IEEE VGTC Pioneers’ “Best Doctoral Dissertation Award”. He is an alumnus of University of Calgary, ENSAD, INRIA, Université Panthéon Sorbonne.
Dr. Till Nagel is a Research Professor of Visual Analytics at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, where he heads the Human Data Interaction Lab, which investigates new ways of supporting different target groups with interactive data representations. He is a co-editor of the book Making with Data (2023), a member of the IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP) Steering Committee, and an associated member of the Medical Faculty Mannheim of Heidelberg University. A major focus of his research is around the themes of urban data and mobility visualizations, and in the democratization of visualization methods. Dr. Nagel has a background in media and computer science, and received his PhD at the Human Computer Interaction group at KU Leuven. He was a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston and Singapore, a postdoctoral fellow at the FHP Urban Complexity Lab, and a guest professor at Burg Giebichenstein University of Arts and Design Halle. He served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS Arts Program 2018 and 2019. His work has been exhibited at Venice Biennale of Architecture, Shanghai Design Exhibition, National Museum of Singapore, and featured in The Guardian, Esquire, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and many more.
Dr. Lora Oehlberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. Her research addresses how technology can better support creativity, collaboration, and curiosity in a range of domains, including interaction design, electronic fashion, improvised digital fabrication, physical data representations, improvised theatre, and healthcare innovation. She leads the Curio Lab, and is one of the faculty leaders of the Interactions Lab, a human-computer interaction research collective. She is currently the director of the Computational Media Design graduate program, and part of the University of Calgary’s Makerspace community of practice group. In 2018 she was awarded a Peak Scholar of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, & Knowledge Engagement from the University of Calgary for her work in “People-Centred Technology for Creativity and Collaboration”. She was an Inria Silicon Valley postdoctoral fellow with the InSitu group at Inria Saclay. She has a PhD and MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
Dr. Wesley Willett is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Visual Analytics. His interests span information visualization, social computing, new media, and human-computer interaction, and his research focuses on pairing data and interactivity to support collaboration, learning, and discovery. At the UofC, Dr. Willett leads the Data Experience Lab and is a member of the Interactions Lab, the university’s human-computer interaction research collective. He is also faculty in the university’s Computational Media Design and Data Science programs, and was awarded the Faculty of Science’s 2019 Excellence in Research Scholarship Award (Early Career). In 2019 he served as General Chair for IEEE VIS 2019, the premier academic conference for visualization and data analytics research.
Episode Notes
Making with Data Book
Making with Data website
Interactive Physical Data Sculptures post
Papers
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3173574.3173728
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3294109.3295627
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3064857.3064859
Related Episodes
Episode #233: Ellie Balk
Episode #232: Stefanie Posavec and Sonja Kuijpers
Episode #187: Stefanie Posavec & Miriam Quick
Sponsor: Nom Nom
Nom Nom delivers fresh food made with whole ingredients, backed by veterinary science. And science tells us that dog health starts in the bowl so improving their diet is one of the best ways to help them live a long, happy life. All you have to do is order, pour and serve.
Try Nom Nom today, go to Nom Nom and get 50% off your first order plus free shipping with the code policyviz.
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 200 guests and eight seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. I’m grateful to everyone who listens and supports the show, and now I’m offering new exciting ways for you to support the show financially. You can check out the special paid version of my newsletter, receive text messages with special data visualization tips, or go to the simplified Patreon platform. Whichever you choose, you’ll be sure to get great content to your inbox or phone every week!
Transcript
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by Nom Nom. Nom Nom is fresh dog food made by real people who really care, they’re purposeful and enthusiastic about giving your dog the best food for them and their health so they can thrive and be their best. Nom Nom’s food is full of fresh proteins your dog loves, and the vitamins and nutrients they need to thrive. You can actually see the proteins and vegetables like beef, chicken, pork, peas, carrots, kale and more right in the food; there’s no fillers or weird ingredients with names you can’t pronounce. Isn’t it time to feel good about the food you’re feeding your dog? Order Nom Nom today by going to nomnomnow.com, and using the coupon code PolicyViz to get 50% off your first order plus free shipping. Plus Nom Nom comes with a money back guarantee. That means if your dog doesn’t love fresh delicious meals, Nom Nom refund your first order, no fillers, no nonsense, just Nom Nom.
PolicyViz Podcast Episode #245: Sam Huron, Till Nagel, Lora Oehlberg, Wesley Willett
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. On this week’s episode of the show, we’re going to talk about a new book Making with Data: Physical Design and Craft in a Data-Driven World. This book is edited by Sam Huron, Till Nagel, Lora Oehlberg, and Wesley Willett. I talk to all four of them, which is a logistical challenge, but we actually got it. It’s a great conversation about data physicalization, so making sculptures, working with paper, working with Legos, whatever it is, we go into all the details about ways in which you can work with data that’s not just from behind your computer screen. I hope you’ll check it out, hope you maybe check out their website, there’s some really good tools and resources and ways that you can start thinking about making these data physicalization projects that are not necessarily just have to be these big sculptures or installations. You can actually do it in your workplace, do it with your kids, do it with your family.
Now, before we get to the actual conversation, which is great, by the way, I had a lot of fun in this episode, I just want to remind you that I have partnered up with Skillwave to create an asynchronous video course, The Art and Science of Data Visualization. It is my standard workshop, but now in an asynchronous video platform, so that you can go in and you can learn all about the ways in which you can do a better job of clearly and effectively communicating your data. There’s also a growing list of Excel and Power BI tutorials to create what will ultimately be a library of more than 80 different graph types. You can go in there and learn all about it. If you check it out now, there’s a discount on what will be the final course price, because we haven’t finished all those tutorial videos yet, but you can go in, and check that out right now. It’s with Skillwave, and you should check out the notes, the link on the show notes page, so that you can learn more about that course.
So with that out of the way, let’s get to this week’s episode of the PolicyViz podcast. I talk with Sam, Till, Wes, and Lora about their fantastic new book Making with Data.
Jon Schwabish: Well, I’ve got the entire team here. This is like a logistical challenge, but we did it. Till, Sam, Wes, Lora, great to see all of you. Wow, this is great. I’m really excited to have you on the show, we’re going to talk about your book, Making with Data. We’re going to talk about how to make with data, so I thought we’d start with intros so folks can sort of hear your voices, place a voice to the name, and then, we’ll talk about this book. So let’s start with Till. Till, welcome to the show. Good to see you again.
Till Nagel: Yeah, hi there. Thanks for having us. So my name is Till Nagel, I’m a professor for Visual Analytics at the Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, where I head the Human Data Interaction Lab, and teach courses on visualization to mostly computer science and design students. And to make it a bit more concrete, currently, we’re working on situated visualizations in an urban context where different people, different citizens can experience city data or open data ranging from mobile apps showing local air quality to embedded AR visualizations to public displays and parks.
JS: Great. Next on my list is Sam.
Samuel Huron: Hi, I’m Samuel Huron, I am working as a professor in the Institut Mines…
JS: You said it like as a question. I don’t know how your students feel about that.
SH: You know in France we have a different name for that thing which is called [Foreign Language].
JS: It is fancier that way though.
SH: And inside the L’Institut Polytechnique de Paris, inside the school which is named Télécom Paris, we also have trouble with the name Paris, so we are putting it everywhere in [inaudible 00:05:03]. I am teaching visualization and interaction design mostly.
JS: Great. And over to Wes.
Wesley Willett: I’m Wesley Willett, I’m an associate professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. And there, I’m part of the Interactions Lab, and also the Data Experience Lab, and my work is mostly situated at this intersection of data visualization and the physical world, be that physicalization or XR visualization, or just visualizations on small screens and environments, and I’m really interested in the interplay between data and spaces and the people who inhabit them.
JS: Great. And last, but certainly not least, Lora.
Lora Oehlberg: Yeah, so I’m Lora Oehlberg, I’m an associate professor of computer science also at the University of Calgary in Canada. I’m more of a human computer interaction researcher, and my background originally is in mechanical engineering, so usually my research is on tools and technologies to foster making and design and creative practice. But when I do data visualization, I do data physicalization, because that kind of plays to my strengths of understanding physical creative practices and physical interactions.
JS: So we’ve got a pretty wide swath of representation here, we’ve got the US, Canada and Europe, so we’re doing pretty well on the show. So I want to get into the details of the book to give folks a sense of what they can learn and the different sort of types or categories the way you’ve detailed it out. But I wanted to start with where did the idea for the book come from – I mean, Wes and Lori have already talked about doing research in this space, but pulling it together in a book versus standalone research papers is a totally different ballgame, so where did this come from?
LO: I can dive in, I will always dive in. The project started at Dagstuhl back in 2018. So Dagstuhl is this computer science academic retreat in Germany, where it sort of brings together groups of researchers in computer science by invitation on very specific topics. And so, we all came together at a Dagstuhl seminar on data physicalization, and we found that we were all interested, not as, I mean, yes, we’re interested in the resulting artifacts, but we’re all very interested in process and how people ended up at the final objects that they eventually had that represented the data. So we started our conversation kind of talking about, well, how do people come up with these artifacts; and so, we started talking with the other attendees, many of whom had already made data physicalizations, and we realized that everybody had a different story, and some, it depended on what your background was. So if you’re a computer scientist, then you might have one way of thinking about data physicalization, but if you’re an artist, then you might have a radically different way of arriving at the particular physical form, the particular data mappings and everything else.
And so, instead of trying to arrive at sort of a canonical definition of how data physicalizations come into being, we instead wanted to figure out a way to communicate the glittering diversity of paths that people take, and also the resulting artifacts that come out of a data physicalization practice, because some of them are no aesthetic sculptor, and some of them are dynamic. Sometimes there are things that people have made very slowly and manually, sometimes there are things that people are making with machines, so we wanted to figure out a format that could accommodate those stories. And so, that’s sort of how we landed at the book, instead of just interviewing people and reducing it down to an eight-page paper for a research venue, we realized that we wanted people to be able to tell their own stories, and have enough room to get into the detail of exactly how they made things.
JS: Can you give me a sense of the background of the folks who were at the Dagstuhl, I’m guessing it was pretty wide?
SH: I think it was really diverse. There is a lot of academics, but there is also some artists, and a lot of creators that end up inside the book. So, for instance, I think Laura Perovich was there Adrien Segal was there, I think [inaudible 00:09:17] was also, and that was really interesting to have this diversity during the Dagstuhl, because we can directly interview them, and a direct discussion with them about their process, and what might be interesting to document and discuss.
JS: And so, for those artists and designers and sculptors, from their perspective, when they’re talking to you all as academics and professors in the field, how are they approaching those conversations? Are they approaching it like I’m the creative, Sam doesn’t know what he’s talking about, right? So how do they broach those conversations?
SH: Well, actually, I think we had an initial way to approach them. We wanted to learn from them. I think that was a goal initially. I mean, I don’t know both the approaches, but [inaudible 00:10:03].
JS: Yeah.
LO: Well, for example, Sam and I talked with Loren Madsen for his chapter quite a bit. He’s a fine artist and has been practicing for decades. And so he, I think enjoyed having sort of the artistic vision conversation, but we were also talking shop about pipe benders; and for him, I think it was sort of this interesting mix of both the philosophy and the motivation and the rationale behind the piece, but also tell us more about pipe bending, which is very mundane for him. He said, I went to the hardware store, I tried some pipe benders, I liked that one, which is completely fine rationale for picking that particular pipe bender to make that particular piece. So it was a very interesting blend of shop talk almost the, you know, down in the details, tell me exactly the tools you use, tell me exactly where you had to tweak things; and also that high level, why are you doing it this way, why is this important to you, why did you make these design choices.
JS: Right. So I want to come back to some of the motivations for why people make these, and what they’re doing them for. But I thought we would go through the – there’s kind of five major sections of the book, and so, I was hoping that you could each sort of talk about each one of these sections. So I’m just going to go through them here, so the first main section is what’s called handcraft – I love all the names of the sections by the way – so handcraft was the first one. I think, Lora, we’re going to lean on you to give us that.
LO: Yeah, I was sort of the primary person guiding all of those chapters. So in the handcraft chapter, we started there, because that’s sort of where physicalization begins. We’ve been practicing physicalization since before language practically, we’ve been capturing things physically, and with hand tools 1000s of years ago. So the handcraft section, sort of, is the first one of the introduction, because we do talk a little bit about some of that history in our introduction, but kind of bring it into all of the more contemporary practices and contemporary rationales for why we are choosing handcraft. And so, in this section, we actually have a fair number of artists who are sort of working manually, so I already mentioned Loren Madsen, but also Mieka West, also, Adrien Segal – Adrien Segal is actually like more of a furniture builder, and so, hers is starting to pivot into this aesthetic, but also some of the functional. And then, we also have people like the V-Pleat origami project – Sarah who’s working more with everyday materials, because her motivation is to try to bring data physicalization into the everyday public. So handcraft has kind of these two sides to it; one side has a much more refined practice and expertise with materials like you see with Adrien, but then handcraft is also extremely accessible if you pick the right materials, like, Sarah’s project with paper.
So it’s sort of in this interesting space of both the accessible but also the expertise, and it’s one where we see a lot of value being placed in that knowledge of the materials and engagement with the process. So Mieka West’s Anthropocene Footprints is a great example of that, where you look at the final representation, it’s not really intended to be a readable visualization of all – each data point, but when you understand the story of how she measured each of the materials for each of the pieces, that experience, that artistic experience was a lot of where the data engagement was happening, and some of that intuition was being built about what is underneath each of these artifacts. So it takes on a different engagement with the data itself, and also a different kind of expertise engagement with the materials.
JS: Yeah, I will say, as a reader, I viewed it as those two separate pieces. They’re sort of like the chapter on making furniture, which is just inspiring and very cool, but nothing that I would ever be able to do, and then, there’s the section on origami, which is like, oh, I could totally do this, right? Like I would need instruction, but that is more accessible, something I can do. So there’s like, kind of, the mix of the inspiration versus the practical, the stuff that, kind of, the stuff that I feel like I can engage with. Okay, so that’s handcraft, so then we get into participation, I think Sam – and Sam and Wes you wrote at least one paper on this that I know of at least, but so this is the participation section.
SH: Yeah, the participation section, I like this, like, going back to history again, as Lora did, I think we have a picture on a Greek vase – Greek cup, where it’s like 500 years before Christ, and this picture depicts all people were virgin. I think this is the first picture that we have in the history of art of the process of virgin. And I think it’s a good example also of physicalization where people are participating to create a physical representation of data. And the chapter of participation in general, it showcases installation or events where communities, groups come together to collectively create the physical representation. So in this case, it’s not one person, which is creating the physicalization, but a group of people. So most of the times the designer is creating kind of a protocol or system plus a device, where a lot of people will go through that. I think the chapter is composed by five – the section is composed by five chapters. The first one is [Foreign Language] and it’s a tabletop where basically people can command the project in a Fab Lab. I think it’s a really complex one, there is between 11 and certain dimension, and kind of like a questionnaire but a physical one. So it’s directly representing real time, what people are inputting inside the physical representation. I think this project with Jose Duarte, Let’s Play with Data, it’s kind of similar, and they are falling along this line, and this notion that we have started to build with Wes, and other people, which is like all we can study visualization as an input system. So what we mean by that is, I think, like, most of the time when we are making a visualization, we are using data that already exists. And sometimes some people in participation section, a lot of people are creating physical representation or digital one, that doesn’t have data at the beginning, and where people are adding these data through the physical of equal representation. So basically, the job that we are using to represent something is empty, and there are other things. I think it’s a fascinating topic, because as visualization researcher, we are focused so much on output, not that much on input.
JS: Right, yeah, that’s really interesting, because you can see people actually participating and doing the thing. And then, you can pull that into your – or see the final thing or pull it into something else and process it elsewhere, yeah, absolutely, very cool.
SH: And there is some puzzle piece inside these sections that are not really input visualization. I think we can sight sea – well, I don’t know, but sea boats, it’s a boat where you can visualize the pollution on a river. And in this case, it’s not like – the data is not directly input by people, but it’s a sensor, which is in the boat, that will – you capture the data, and then a light will represent the data and through a picture, you can see the evolution of pollution inside the river. And there is this other piece that I really like, which is like 100% City from Rimini Protokoll. I don’t know if we can call that an input visualization with – I don’t know what is your take on it, but it’s a world performance, which is happening for a very long time, and where the data more collecting through the Census Bureau of the city, yeah.
JS: I have questions about the participation one, but I want to get through the chapter first, because there’s just so much good stuff to ask about, but I want to make sure we get through. Okay, so handcraft participation, Section 3 is digital production, and Till I think you’re going to…
TN: Yeah, so digital production, I’d say, so after we heard about handcraft, and participatory, this is kind of like the new construction technique section. So which is not so much at least based in the historic examples, but I would even call it now the most, let’s say, classic making chapter because this is where the modern fabrication tools such as a 3D printer or a laser cutter have been used. So this is also I think different to the creators of the constructors in the other sections is here that there’s kind of a shift from the mastery of tools to the mastery of software, which is also how Yvonne Jansen, so the section intro writer or author has described it, and I love the projects in that chapter, because it’s not just you are writing a software, and then, the final piece comes out of it, and it’s finished, but there are so many different things to consider. For example, there’s Nick Dulake and Ian Gwilt, and they created a Dataseeds project it’s called, they have little different seed shaped things and objects which spin and fall. So you can throw it in there, and they’re just falling, and that’s representing the faults in different age groups, and in their chapter they are documenting also how many different experimentations they had, how many different materials and shapes they had to construct, not just to think about it, to have a concept about, but to test it out, throw it in there, and see how this will fall, and I think this kind of vast range of expectation is also very, very important.
Another interesting aspect here is, which Yvonne has highlighted is that even though this is digital production, a manual assembly still has to be done. For example, there’s [inaudible 00:20:22] and it’s, well, first of all, it’s a landscape of New York of Manhattan, and it is submerged in black liquid. And the whole sculpture then can rise or go down into the water, submerge again into this kind of liquid. And so, it acts as a physical filter. But in that design and construction process he’s describing, he’s also showing how he not only digital or laser cut these acrylic shapes, but then assembled them, glued them together manually. And so, this is always kind of this mix of techniques and of approaches. And what I like about the White Island Project is because it’s also like a dynamic project, it’s a nice segue to the actuation section.
JS: That was beautiful Till, beautiful. We’ll just go straight to Wes. Okay, actuation, which is a great name for this section. So, Wes?
WW: Yeah, so actuation is I was trying to collect a set of projects that build on some of the things that you saw on the previous section, using a lot more modern fabrication techniques, but starting to think about incorporating mechanisms and robotics in a way that allow them to actually show live data or dynamic data, and in a bunch of different contexts. And so, we have a couple of projects that are thinking about these, it’s kind of just dynamic data displays. So there’s a project called loop that is a little sculpture that would sit on a shelf in your house and actually just shows the same sort of completion rings that you might see on an Apple Watch or a Fitbit for your steps over the course of the day, but manifesting this as kind of a sculptural object in your environment.
And then another couple of projects that are a little bit more public, so ones that are Tenison Road Charts from some folks at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, the design of these really cool physical bar charts and pie charts that can move dynamically in responses to survey inputs from people on the street. And then, there’s an even bigger and more architectural scale one called Airfield that was actually deployed in the Atlanta airport for a period that shows live takeoffs and landings of aircraft at the airport, by these changes in these big LCD panels that were hanging in an atrium, so you get this sort of big sweeping effect through the space, every time a plane lands or takes off, when starting to give you this experience of data in a way that’s just much bigger and sort of more immersive and more live than you might get on screen or on a phone.
And pushing beyond that, we have a couple of projects that are starting to think about maybe the future of interacting with data in physical spaces, so there’s the EMERGE tabletop from Jason Alexander’s group, previously at Lancaster University, and now at Bath, that’s trying to build a big physical bar chart that you could actually manipulate and use to display lots of different kinds of data in a more analytic setting. And then, this zooids project from Matthew [inaudible 00:23:14] and his collaborators that’s starting to think about, well, what if you try to build arbitrary visualizations out of tiny swarm robots, and so, they have dozens of tiny little robots that can drive all over your desk and turn themselves into a whole bunch of different kinds of charts. And I think this is really the, like, the most bleeding edge point in the space of data physicalization right now, but it kind of points to the future in which people are imagining programmable matter of visualizations and places where we might actually interact with visualizations, not by looking at them on screens, but by sort of having them appear dynamically on the desk in front of us. So it’s a little bit more sci-fi, but there’s a bunch of interesting work to still there.
JS: It definitely feels sci-fi for sure. I feel like there was a Disney movie at some point with like micro robots, I can’t remember what movie it was, like, that’s what [inaudible 00:24:05]. But it’s also interesting, before we get to the last section, it is interesting because I remember one of the earlier, like, sort of big data visualization projects that caught my eye was Aaron Koblin’s flight patterns project where he tracked flight paths over US airspace, and this is sort of taking that project and kind of installing it, in a kind of interesting way, I think, because it’s both the sculpture but it’s also in the place where you are flying. I’m not sure if I have a question about that, but maybe my question for US is working through this project, like, do you reflect back on the evolution of the field over the last, I mean, even just like decade, I mean, I don’t know, Aaron’s project was probably 10-12 years ago, something like that, a pretty short period of time, we’ve gone from using processing to building sculptures in airports.
WW: Well, the kind of crazy thing about that is that the airfield project is actually probably pretty close to contemporaneous with the other work. It’s one of the oldest projects in the book. It’s actually old enough that that particular sculpture doesn’t exist in the Atlanta airport anymore, although there’s another parallel one that they built around the same time that’s at the airport at San Jose. It’s actually showing weather data rather than flight data. So I think, in many of these cases, we have at least a decade and maybe more of data from a whole bunch of sources being really widely available, and being accessible enough that people who aren’t necessarily data visualization researchers or designers have been able to think about picking it up and building projects, sometimes pretty, pretty, audacious ones using it.
JS: Okay. Our last section of the book is environment. Till, I think you’re going to cover that one for us, right?
TN: I’d try to. So this section is a bit the odd one out, I’d say. It still fits into the theme of describing one rendering process, so to speak, so how the data came into the world. And in this case, these projects are using some kind of environmental processes. And so, we have a bunch of different super interesting sculptures and objects, and maybe just by describing two of them, it becomes a bit clearer what this section is about, and one is Perpetual Plastic by a Liina Klauss, Moritz Stefaner and Skye Morét, and they collected plastic trash on a beach, so debris which has been floating in the ocean, or thrown by humans into or polluted the environment, and they collected it, and sorted it by color, but also by fading, or how is it called, like, if the plastic ages. And so, then they constructed a large physicalization kind of based on a classic diagram of Sankey, and put it on the beach where they collected that. And so, in that it also, similar to what we discussed before at the airport, it shows something where, not necessarily, there the trash has been thrown into the ocean, but at least where there’s kind of close connection thematic relation to that area is existing.
And another project is Solar Totems by Charles Sowers. This is a project where he is referencing an old technique, kind of, sun clocks, where the sun then, of course, shines onto an object, and through the shadow, you can read time. But typically, these are ephemeral, so they’re just showing the current time at that current location or place. And what they wanted to do, and there have been also historic apparatus, which are then recording, like, by burning the sunlight over lens into some kind of tracking device. But typically, the other problem is that the sun over the days, over the weeks does not change too much on its run. And so, what he’s done is combined this kind of classical approach with sort of from the general production or actuation, it had a motor, and so, there was a bit of this kind of lens, which was shifted day by day by slight amount. And so afterwards, it was much more readable, and so you have this kind of burnt line for every single day, and if it’s darker, then you know the sun was brighter or shining longer; and if it’s not, and no burn track at all, then there were maybe clouds or it was just like winter and so on. And this has been put, or this kind of burn track is in large wooden stem, so like actual trees. And what I love about this is also this kind of super complicated mathematical model he had to use, and he had to use CNC to cut these kind of trees’ trunks, so that the different projection of the sunrays over here is always linear. So it’s like a super complex mechanism to mostly make this more readable in the end. And there are now three trees, and you can see now how it changes also over the different years. But maybe this is also something where others want to add on this section on the environmental part.
SH: One of the things that I find really fascinating in the environment part, basically it’s like creating something where you are using the force of physics or chemistry to update the visualization. And I think, like, just from that perspective, it’s blew a little bit my mind. So every time I’m like thinking of a visualization, I think how can I use the force of the world to update my visualization, what will be the process for that.
JS: Yeah.
LO: Well, and to me there’s two ways of thinking about it metaphorically. One is that the environment is the fabrication machine, so to speak. So instead of a 3D printer, you just have – you build a system such that the world does the building for you. The other metaphor you can think of is from a participation lens, the environment is participating, so like you’re building a system that allows the environment to make the mark that it would make. So it’s sort of this weird blend of, it’s instead of sensing, you’re just allowing the environment to write for itself. So you’re not having to translate through a sensor, and then, make the mark. The environment just makes its own mark.
JS: Right. Okay, so thank you for that review, and folks should obviously check out the book, so they can see all the images and the pictures, and there is accompanying company website that has a whole bunch of resources which we’ll talk about when we get to the end. So with all of this sort of in our back pocket, I think my core question to you all is, what is it about data physicalization that you think is appealing to people – you’ve talked about these different approaches, but whenever I go to like a conference or have conversations like this, people get very excited about it. Is it the fact that we’re on our computers too much, is it that we’re all nerds sitting behind our computer, like, what is it that you think is so appealing about any of these different projects?
WW: I can take a stab at this, I think there’s kind of two different main themes that I see at play. One of them is the level of accessibility, especially of the more participatory ones, where you can create something that really anyone can interact with, in a way that’s maybe not true, even for some of our most elegant, simple, online visualizations that we create, like, the barrier to entry is very low, and people’s comfort with interacting with them often is very high, because it sort of feels like playing with Legos, or sort of doing a really simple craft project in a way that is just like anybody can do it. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lot of these examples that I think just get to the point of being really interesting, evocative pieces of art, and are able to do something because they’re sitting in real spaces and are using real materials, that goes beyond what we can accomplish on the screen, and end up being really impressive and capture people’s imagination, because they’re able to do something new.
SH: Yeah, I think to jump on that, we are humans, right? So we are belonging to the physical world. I mean, I’m not a digital being, right? And in a way, when we have a physicalization, it’s present, it’s here, it’s always here until we crush it out, or we take it out. Right? Well, visualization, you can print it, but when it’s on the screen, when the screen is off, there is no visualization anymore. And I think the things about accessibility is really a strong thing, like, a lot of my research before doing this book was about trying to understand how people that are non-visualization experts can access visualization, and do some reflection on top of it. And at the end, the only response I can come up with was, okay, physical object is probably easier to manipulate than any type of software for, like, I don’t know, for, if my grandma wants to make a chart, it’s probably a better way to do it.
Another thing which is also, I think every type of tool that we are using to represent data will bias us in one way or in another, right? If you are using Excel, you have a list of buttons with a list of premade visualizations, right? And when you are doing visualizations, you are representing data physically, you will maybe have also bias, but it will be also really interesting to explore different way you might present this data, because all the tools that you will use will probably afford other approaches to the data, and will help you to reflect on the data from a different perspective. And I think sometime in the digital world, we have the tendency to go super fast, because we have this super powerful tool, like, we can take this really big bunch of data and just apply this [inaudible 00:34:28] and whoa, whoa, suddenly it’s here. But with physicalization, you will have to, like, manipulate all of these elements, and think about what type of material, what type of idioms can ever make – you don’t have predefined idioms, so you have to invent it maybe. So that’s also one of the things which makes it really exciting too.
JS: Yeah. So are any of you creating data physical products projects, I don’t want to say products, that makes it sound like a shop, but like doing projects, either personally or professionally maybe and teaching – I know, Lora, you had mentioned one as we were getting ready for this that sounded pretty meditative.
LO: Yeah, while I was on sabbatical, I was doing a lot of data crochet. So, I mean, I have a lot of tools at my disposal, but I was trapped, and I wanted a way of making things that was very portable. So for crochet, all you need is yarn, which you can find at your local thrift store or craft store, and a crochet hook, which is, again, super small and portable. And so, while on sabbatical, I made a series of crocheted physicalizations with full expectation that it would break down, and that helped me understand some of the challenges of translating data into these physical forms, sometimes they are readable, sometimes they’re not, sometimes you get lost, it happens. Currently, I’ve got a student, Sidney Pratt, who’s been thinking a lot about wearables, so she built fashion tech, usually. And so, she has been thinking a lot about how do you create sort of wearable physicalizations that might reflect the wearer, but also ones that potentially build some empathy for the wearer, so one of her latest projects is – so her scenario is you’re walking, a woman at night walking down the street, and you notice someone behind you, how do you represent your awareness of that person? So she’s trying to physicalize the distance between her and the person behind you by having a collar or having sort of – it’s this like mail, chainmail kind of structure come on edge, as a way of sort of physicalizing that piece of information, but also communicating some of the feeling that you have if you’re being followed at night. So also thinking about not just the physicality of it, but the context, so is this something that sits on your shelf, or is this something that you’re wearing, is there a story behind what you’re trying to communicate as, as you’re making something that might be unseen now and suddenly very physical and very noticeable to people around you. So yeah, that’s sort of where the current work at least in my group has been going, thinking more about kind of wearables and physicality.
SH: Gee, you’ve been running a class now.
LO: Oh yeah.
TN: Yes, maybe connecting that, and so, also the readability issue, but also the susceptibility, or how the whole sense we have, it could be used, and besides like the classical visual variables like position, size, and color, we also use from visualization or no from visualization, now we have all the haptic, the tactile, the kinesthetic variables for our use. And Evonika and colleagues just published a visual vocabulary, a design vocabulary for data physicalization, and they’re talking about all these different variables. And kinesthetic is like motion and viscosity and inertia and so on, and which we can feel based on the movements of our muscles of our joints and tendons and so on, when we are manipulating such objects. And in our class on physicalization, one student group, they created a project physicalizing critical alcohol consumption in Germany; and, well, they started with a kind of like, more classical physicalization, so they constructed a laser cut wooden tile grid map of Germany with all the different federal states, and put bottles on each tile, so readymade actual wine bottles, and filled them with two liquids colors, for female and male consumption percentages.
So it’s kind of like a stacked bar chart based on fluids, but the project is called the hidden burden of alcohol, and what is hidden below a black curtain are the weights attached to each of the bottles, which was also a huge challenge. But when people are now lifting a bottle, they can feel different weights representing mortality for every state. And so, this project not only employs maybe a rather simple metaphor, hey, bottles and liquids is alcohol, a theme about it, which is intention to communicate it clearly, but it uses the hidden weights to kind of show afterwards or feel these kind of initially invisible data to reflect also the social taboo of risk of alcohol consumption and fatalities. And I think that is something which is also still a super interesting direction to explore, how to deeper, and maybe on a more visceral level, connect to the experience people have with data objects.
JS: Yeah. I wanted to ask a lot of the – we talked about the airport installation a little bit, but a lot of these other pieces, you can easily envision showing up in a museum, and I think it’s one of the places where, like, data physicalization shows up all the time, but we just kind of maybe walk by it. Do you think that the DataViz field needs to learn a little bit more from museum curators?
Here’s an easy one, so I live in Virginia outside DC, my office is in DC, it’s about two blocks away from the Air and Space Museum. One of the great data visualizations that the Air and Space Museum has is right outside the museum, it has these silver posts with mockups of planets, and they are spaced out scaled, right? And so, it goes blocks down the National Mall, and it’s just such a very smart, clever way to work with data, because you could, as a kid, you could go out and you can touch the earth, and you can walk down three blocks and touch Jupiter – I know we don’t talk about Pluto anymore, but still, like, I just wonder whether there’s more of a – or maybe I’m sure it exists somewhere, and I just don’t know about it – but I wonder if there’s more of an interaction between the DataViz field and museum curators that can work together in this space.
LO: I think for sure, I mean, to me, it comes back to, yes, you have this object that represents data, but you can always ask, okay, but now how do you interact with that object. And so, it’s sort of passive, it’s the, I mean, you end up with initial questions of even just scale and asking, well, are we talking about a teeny tiny desktop physicalization, are we talking about an architectural scale physicalization where you’re, even if you’re not touching it, your sort of passive level of interaction with this object is already impacted by scale. But I feel like once you start getting into the physical interactions that you have, that starts to influence – again, it’s compelling, because it has this physicality to it, it’s grounded in our world, it translates from our existing interactions, and actually I feel like Till’s example is a perfect one where you look at the bottles, and you think you have the full story. But once you do that physical interactive piece, the weight, pun intended, of the actual dataset starts to hit you. And it’s the sort of thing where if you just look at it and kept on walking, you would not actually get the full story. So I do feel like, and similar to when we think about graphical visualization, there’s a big difference between reading a book, or looking at a newspaper and seeing a chart versus having an interactive chart is that exact same thing translated physically where if you have an object, or a sculpture that you walk around, that’s one thing, but if you have something that’s a kinetic sculpture, or something that moves or interacts or reacts to the people around them, then it kind of hits at a different level.
I always feel like science museums, especially because they’re trying to teach people about often the physical world and kids about the physical world, tend to do this really well, because they are trying to get people engaged in interacting with the subject matter on a very kind of visceral level. So I definitely feel like there’s a lot to be learned, especially from, like, next time you walk around a science museum, think about like, okay, if Air and Space Museum just had a giant display and interactive, scalable picture of all of the spacecraft, would that be as satisfying as actually walking into a room and seeing all of the spacecraft, and actually getting a good sense of how big they are relative to you, but also how big they are relative to each other as we go over time. It’s a different emotional reaction you have; it’s a very different intuition that you’re building, even as you just see it in a space, and then, especially if you’re allowed to go inside of it or connect with it in different ways.
JS: Yeah, I will give one more plug to the Air and Space Museum. For those who don’t know, and are visiting DC, there’s an Air and Space Museum downtown, which is your sort of the standard Smithsonian. But then out by Dulles Airport is one known as Udvar-Hazy which has, like, the space shuttle and fighter jets, and exactly to your point, Lora, you actually can touch the space shuttle and stand below it and sense its enormity, yeah.
Okay, so I want to come back to the book real quickly, so I have two more questions about the book. So first is, I got to know who did the cover design. So for those who haven’t picked up the book, the cover design is beautiful, it is a, I don’t know, what would you call it, kind of like a ridgeline shard kind of?
LO: Sam, do you have it with you right now?
SH: I have it.
LO: Okay.
JS: Oh, he’s got it, okay. Well, this is great. So while Sam grabs the model, it’s kind of like a ridgeline chart kind of out of a construction paper, maybe, yeah. So I was kind of wondering, like, was it built – did someone like mock it up in Photoshop, I’m more excited now that I’m actually going to see it. Oh so okay, oh so it’s an actual – okay, so Sam, what do you got here?
SH: Oh yeah. I’m pretty sure Wes and Lora will be better at describing it first.
LO: Yeah, Wes, do you want to take a go? I can also get by.
WW: Sure. Yeah, so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do for the cover of this book. Because originally we thought about just putting pictures of some of the projects on it, but we really loved the idea of having the cover of the book be a physicalization of the contents of the book. And what we have is original [inaudible 00:45:03] that’s actually showing the lengths of all of the different components of all of the individual chapters in the book. And we actually hired a Parisian paper crafts designer to build this for us using data from the book. You also see – I think you have the softcover copy of this Jon.
JS: Yeah.
WW: If you flip the softcover back to the page, a few pages in that has the title in, you actually get a legend for the cover as well. So you can see which one of the [inaudible 00:45:31] in the front is which one of the chapters of the book. And so, we have this little kind of simple physicalization interaction that anybody who has a soft cover version of the book can experience too.
LO: It’s one case where the soft cover totally pays off, because you can sort of gently pull back the soft cover and align it with the legend and see what’s going on.
JS: Okay, very smart, very smart, oh I see, yes, okay.
SH: And maybe a plaque, we have a whole blog post on the design process of the cover, and where we are also showing all the different approaches, and then, also the construction of the actual physicalization, which then came to be the cover of the book, which, by the way, sorry, just to connect back to the previous discussion point is, now this is a cover, and it’s 2D, and it’s not even clear. I’m holding up the book again, showing it’s just a flat piece, but in actuality it is a physical object, and I think that is now a bit of a, I don’t know, fun aspect maybe, but it’s also a bit of a weird thing that we have now a book, it’s that free, flat documentation of all these physical objects. And we did discuss about this before how we perceive these objects, and the different scales, and now they’re all little pictures in a kind of large sized book. But this is, I guess, always a problem, so maybe what we should do, or others, is an actual exhibition only about all these different physicalizations, and also from different scales, so maybe within a museum, and out in the city scale.
JS: In the world.
SH: Yeah.
JS: I mean, it is also true, right, that Sam is the only one of the four of you who actually gets the hole that has that piece, right, which, I don’t know, maybe you’re all annoyed at Sam, I don’t know. But there’s that part of it too.
SH: No, no, no.
LO: Well, he just didn’t perennially have it in the background…
JS: Right, in the background.
LO: He’d hang it on his wall frames beautifully. That’s what annoys me, it should be a part, Sam.
JS: Yeah.
SH: My plan is to cut it, because actually, we did have an issue, and we had, like, two versions of it, one which is not older, and one which is older. So we can get it, and then, we are going to have full physicalization.
JS: So Till you just mentioned the blog post, I wanted to ask about the website, and where people can get more information about the book, and the four of you, and I know there are more resources on that website, because it’s not just a website for the book, there’s more tools and resources on there.
TN: Exactly. So makingwithdata.org is the companion website to our book, it describes the book, all the amazing authors and contributors to the book, which are, as we said before, designers, artists, researchers, and also academics who were writing a bit more theoretical, extra intros, connecting the different ideas and concepts of the projects and of the chapters within each section. And we are also having a block there, where we are discussing parts of how the book came to be, for example, like, the structure of the book, but also the cover, for example, and recently, we released the template and the template is connecting or bridging back to the beginning of this podcast on Dagstuhl, we started also interviewing the people there; and based on these interviews, then we coded the interviews and so on, and then based on that, we constructed a template for the authors. As Lora said, we wanted to have the voices of the different people contributing to the book, but still having kind of a similar structure, kind of a similarity, how they’re describing the project and the contracting processes. And so, this template also people can find on the website, and we’re describing also how we design the template, what the ideas and the concept is behind it, but also then for others to use and, for example, the students in the course I mentioned before where there’s kind of hyper physicalization, they also use the template and this gives them and others the opportunity to think in a bit more structured way on the objects, on the challenge they were facing, and also invites them to reflect on the piece. And with this we are hoping to also have others join this kind of force, which we would be happy to then at some point publish also on the website.
JS: That’s terrific. So folks should check it out, I’ll put a link to all those on the show notes. So before we go, you’ve got the template for people to get started, the book can help people get started, but if someone said, well, I want to make a physical data visualization, do you have a recommendation for how people should think about this to get started – because, like, not everybody has a maker lab, not everybody knows how to bend a pipe, like, what would you say to someone who’s like, oh, this is really cool, I’d like to do this at work or with my kids, like, what would you say?
WW: Well, I think there’s no one way of Making with Data. In some ways, that’s the whole message of the book, that you can do this using a huge variety of different tools and techniques; and if you’re someone who hasn’t created one of these things before, pick a tool that you’re comfortable with, and maybe that tool is Lego bricks, maybe that tool is craft paper or pipe cleaners or something. Maybe if you’re a roboticist, that tool is a robot, right? The tool could be just about anything. If you’re a woodworker, that tool could be your woodworking tools. So think about what tools you’re comfortable and expressive with, what kind of data you want to work with, and try to find a match. There’s a kind of infinite space of possible approaches for doing this, and the big message that we want people to take away from the book is that there’s probably one out there that is a perfect fit for you.
SH: And if you make micro-physicalization, and you use a template to document it, please send it to us, like, the tree is not finished, we are just starting with this book, we want to collect more process and we will probably put this online, so please send it to us.
JS: That’s terrific. So we’ve got physical manifestations, like, very meta, pulling all these experiences and these projects together, terrific. So Lora, Wes, Sam, Till, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been fantastic. Congrats on a great book. And I’ll send you pictures of my physical DataViz projects soon. All right, so thanks all for coming on show, I appreciate it.
WW: Thanks.
TN: Thank you
SH: Thanks so much.
LO: Thank you.
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week’s episode of the show. I hope you enjoy that, I hope you’ll check out the book, I hope you’ll check out their website. And more importantly, I hope you will try some of these data physicalization projects, these ideas where you actually work with data with your hands; you can use Legos, post-it notes, paper, string, whatever it might be, to work more closely with data. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Sotsky Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you’d like to help support the show financially, please visit our PayPal page or our Patreon page at patreon.com/policyviz.
