The earliest participatory visualizations were probably voting systems. Voting in Greece was introduced in the 5th century BC. Adult male citizens were invited to express their opinion by dropping a pebble in an urn: a white pebble meant "yes" and a black pebble meant "no". Sometimes two urns were used. The left image is a detail of a Greek wine cup from the 5th century BC, and is one of the earliest known depictions of the act of voting. The middle image is a modern reconstruction from a TV […]

The World Game Workshop used a giant (basketball court size) world map to display population growth, distribution, and density, energy use, food and a host of other global variables and problems. 100 people were placed on the map, located where humanity is currently in the world, each one representing 1% of the global population. They were then placed in charge of their region and given the responsibility of solving the world’s problems. Sources: Post by Medard Gabel, Executive Director, […]

An interactive public installation where visitors could engage by picking coloured strings corresponding to feelings, inspirations, thoughts or influences that make the person they are today, and link these strings to words on the wall to make a path visualizing associated concepts tied to each of these feelings, inspirations, thoughts and influences. WHAT MADE ME was designed by Dorota Grabkowska and Kuba Kolec for the Birmingham Made Me Design Expo (15-22 June 2012) at the Mailbox, […]

Designed within the community of practice of a French FabLab, Cairn aims at understanding the variety of practices within FabLabs. Cairn explores tangible alternatives to questionnaires and other traditional evaluation techniques, and stresses aesthetic and affective dimensions to create an engaging experience. It invites Fablab visitors to reflect on their practices by materializing their activities using small colored woodentiles. Interacting individually with Cairn, people contribute to […]

In order to inform a local audience about a largely-avoided topic such as cancer, a research study was commissioned by KnowAndBe.Live, a startup working in the field of cancer prevention awareness, with the aim of fostering a bottom-up information request from a local audience. The research team included a designer, a sociologist and experts on the topic of cancer-prevention, who worked together relying on a collaborative design approach, with the goal of delineating possible strategies to […]

A public participation project, in which the boundaries of the political debate were discussed. Hoping to define a respectable “clean” political discourse and formulate a treaty reflecting the public's expectations of what constitutes a legitimate discourse based on political ideology or clear up when is a misuse of a public position. The project was made up of an ice-cream truck, driving around Israel periphery, inviting the public to participate in 4 interactive games asking question about […]

Edo is a participatory data physicalization meant to enable a small community to track the carbon impact of their dietary choices. Each type of food item is represented as a token, a disk, whose surface area encodes the carbon impact of a typical portion of that type of food (data source: Agribalyse). After a meal, one can add data by selecting tokens for all the types of food one just consumed. For example, a burger with fries would require a beef token, a bread token, a salad token, and a […]

Weave is a project that aim to raise the awareness of invisible barriers faced by immigrants navigating Dutch public systems through data physicalization. People can pick a thread corresponding to their country of origin, and thread individual responses to each question. Upon finishing, they can wear the special glasses that unveil a deeper meaning of each question. The project employs metaphors to help interpret the discursive artifact. The more challenging options are placed higher to […]