Constructive Visualizations
Samuel Huron
Yvonne Jansen
Sheelagh Carpendale
Overview
The accessibility of infovis authoring tools to a wide audience has been identified as one of the major research challenges. A key task of the authoring process is the development of visual mappings. While the infovis community has long been deeply interested in finding effective visual mappings, comparatively little attention has been placed on how people construct visual mappings. In this paper we present the results of a study designed to shed light on how people spontaneously transform data into visual representations. We asked people to create, update and explain their own information visualizations using simple materials such as tangible building blocks. We learned that all participants, most of whom had no experience in visualization, were readily able to create and talk about their own visualizations. On the basis of our observations, we discuss the actions of our participants in the context of the development of their visual representations and their analytic activities. From this we suggest implications for tool design that can enable broader support for infovis authoring.
Additional Project Websites:
- Project page with additional material at INRIA.
Images
Video
Watch below or at Youtube.
Download video: mp4 (76 MB)
Publications
| Tiffany Wun, Jennifer Payne, Samuel Huron, Sheelagh Carpendale. Comparing Bar Chart Authoring with Microsoft Excel and TangibleTiles. In the 18th Proceedings of the Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis). (Groningen, the Netherlands), The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016. | 
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| Huron, S., Jansen, Y. and Carpendale, S, Constructing Visual Representations: Investigating the Use of Tangible Tokens. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on, 20(12):2102-2111, Dec, 2014. |
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| Huron, Samuel, Carpendale, Sheelagh, Thudt, Alice, Tang, Anthony and Mauerer, Michael. Constructive Visualization. In In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. (honorable mention award). (New York, NY, USA), ACM, pages 433-442, 2014. |
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