Call for Participation

Humans have invented and used many forms to represent data, in order to facilitate sense making, communication and exploration processes. Data visualization is becoming a common practice in industry and a recognized research field that contributes to a richer understanding of the potential to encode data visually. Yet representations which address more than the visual sense and which could facilitate sense making in novel ways are still largely unexplored. Data physicalization, i.e. the design of physical artifacts whose geometry or material properties encode data, is an emerging research area that explores the potential of physical data representations as a sense making and communication medium; making information genuinely graspable.

This workshop is the fourth in a loosely connected series that commenced in 2014 at the IEEE VIS conference. Since then, we have conducted related workshops at ACM CHI ​and ACM TEI​. These have attracted practitioners and researchers from the Design, Information Visualization, Computer Science, Interaction Design and Tangible Interaction communities.
Previous workshops demonstrated that Data Physicalization is a vast emerging field that connects multiple and cross‐disciplinary perspectives. Topics of interest range from perceptual and cognitive aspects to application‐oriented questions.

This workshop is targeted specifically to the design community of DRS: through hands‐on activities, we will introduce researchers and practitioners to the data physicalization process and engage them in an open discussion about (1) potential application scenarios, (2) how to engage people in data physicalization practices (e.g., in educational and/or creative settings), and (3) identify the research questions and challenges that arise in their own work.

Prerequisites

This workshop is open to all who are interested in it. No prior knowledge is required. Space is however limited and you will need to sign up to reserve a spot. More info about this later.