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Data Physicalization with the ‘Making with Data’ author team
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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.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
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Overview of 'Making with Data'
00:01:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. 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, Laura Olberg and Wesley Willett. I talk to all four of them, which is a little
00:01:33
Speaker
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. I hope you maybe check out their website. There's some really good tools and resources in ways that
00:01:56
Speaker
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.
00:02:07
Speaker
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.
00:02:29
Speaker
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 tutorials.
00:02:52
Speaker
videos yet, but you can go in and check that out right now.
Interview with Book Editors
00:02:55
Speaker
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 talked with Sam, Till, Wes and Laura about their fantastic new book, Making with Data. Well, I've got the entire team here. This is like a
00:03:22
Speaker
logistical challenge, but we did it. Till, Sam, Wes, Laura, great to see all of you. Wow, this is great. Really excited to have you on the show. We're gonna talk about your book, Making with Data. We're gonna 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.
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, hi there. Thank you all. Thanks for having us. So my name is Ter Nagel. I'm a professor for Visual Analytics at the Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, where I had the Human Data Interaction Lab and teach courses on visualization to mostly computer science and design students.
00:04:04
Speaker
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 urban data ranging from mobile apps showing local air quality to embedded AR visualizations to public displays and parks.
00:04:22
Speaker
Great. Next on my list is Sam. Hi, I'm Samuel Huron. I'm working as a professor in the... You say that like as a question. I don't know how you students feel about that, but...
00:04:39
Speaker
You know, in France, we have a different name for that site, which is called Madre de Conférance. It is fancier that way, though. And I'm inside a political technique, the Paris, inside the school, which is now I am a telecom Paris. We also have this trouble with the name Paris, so we are putting it everywhere in all the institutional names. I'm teaching visualization and interaction design mostly.
00:05:08
Speaker
Great, and over to Wes.
00:05:11
Speaker
So 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. I'm really interested in the interplay between data and spaces and the people who inhabit them.
00:05:39
Speaker
Great. And last but certainly not least, Laura. Yeah. So I'm Laura Olberg. 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 designing 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.
00:06:10
Speaker
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 this show. So great. So I want to get into the details of the book to give folks a sense of what they can learn and the different 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 Laurie, you've already talked about doing
00:06:34
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research in this space, but playing it together in the book versus standalone research papers is a totally different ballgame. So where does this come from?
Origins and Concept of the Book
00:06:43
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I can dive in. I will always dive in. The project started at a dog stool back in 2018. So dog stool is this computer science academic retreat in Germany.
00:06:53
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where it sort of brings together groups of researchers and computer science by invitation on very specific topics. And so we all came together at a dogstool 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 were 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,
00:07:23
Speaker
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. 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.
00:07:52
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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, you know, a static sculptor.
00:08:16
Speaker
And some of them are dynamic. Sometimes they're things that people have made very slowly and manually. Sometimes they're 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.
00:08:45
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Can you give me a sense of the background of the folks who are at the dogstool? I'm guessing it was pretty wide. 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 Perovic was there.
00:09:12
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Adrian Cikal was there. I think Diedma was there also. And that was really interesting to have this diversity during the talk because we can directly interview them and direct discussion with them about their process and what might be interesting to document and discuss. And so for those artists and designers and sculptors, from their perspective, when they're talking to you all as
00:09:41
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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 approach those conversations? 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 how they approach us, but I know how they approach them. Yeah.
00:10:07
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Well, for example, Sam and I talked with Lauren 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.
00:10:36
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which is very mundane for him. He said, I went to the hardware store. I tried some pipe benders. I liked that one. And 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
00:10:54
Speaker
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?
00:11:09
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Right. So I want to come back to some of the motivations for why people make these and what
Exploring Handcraft in Data Physicalization
00:11:14
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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 we'll just 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 these sections, by the way. So Handcraft is the first one. I think, Laura, we're going to we're going to lean on you to
00:11:36
Speaker
Give us the... Yeah, I was the primary person guiding all of those chapters. In the Handcraft chapter, we started there because that's where physicalization begins. We've been practicing physicalization since before language practically. We've been capturing things physically and with hand tools thousands of years ago. The Handcraft section is the first one off the introduction because we do talk a little bit about some of that history in our introduction.
00:12:01
Speaker
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 Lauren Madsen, but also Mika West. Also Adrian Siegel, Adrian Siegel is actually like more of a furniture builder. And so hers is starting to pivot into this
00:12:28
Speaker
aesthetic, but also some of the functional. Um, and then we also have, uh, people like, uh, the V pleat origami project, um, Sarah, who's working more with everyday materials because her motivation is to try to bring data physicalization into the everyday public. Um, 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 Adrian.
00:12:55
Speaker
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
00:13:04
Speaker
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 the engagement with the process. So Mika 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
00:13:32
Speaker
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.
00:13:54
Speaker
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 like the section on origami, which is like, oh, I could totally do this, right? Like I would need instruction, but like that is more accessible, something I can do. So there's like kind of a mix of the inspiration versus the practical, the stuff that the kind of the stuff that I feel like I could, I can engage with.
00:14:22
Speaker
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. So this is the participation section. Yeah, the participation section, I like this like going back to history again, but as Laura did, I think there is a
00:14:44
Speaker
We have a picture on a Greek cup where it's like 500 years before Christ and this picture depicts all people who were voting. I think this is the first picture that we have in the history of the process of voting.
00:15:04
Speaker
And I think it's a good example also of a physicalization where people are participating to create a physical representation of data.
00:15:15
Speaker
And the chapter of participation in general, it's showcase 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 time, the designer is creating a
00:15:35
Speaker
kind of a protocol or a 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 chapter. The first one is a CHAEM by Pauline Golay and Thierry Dasset. And it's a tabletop where basically people can document their project in a fab lab. I think it's a really complex one. There is between 11 and 13 dimension and
00:16:04
Speaker
Kind of like a questioner, but a physical one. So it's directly represented in real time what people are inputting inside the physical representation.
00:16:13
Speaker
I think this project with Jose Duarte, let's play with data, is 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, oh, 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,
00:16:36
Speaker
We are using data that already exists. And sometimes some people, 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 or visual representation. So basically, the idioms that we are using to represent something is empty and they are adding that. I think it's a fascinating topic because
00:17:03
Speaker
As a visualization researcher, we have focused so much on output, not that much on input. Right, yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting, right? 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.
00:17:27
Speaker
And there is some other piece inside this section that are not really input visualization. I think we can see, well, I don't know, but see boats. It's a boat where you can visualize the pollution on a river.
00:17:44
Speaker
And in this case, the data is not directly input by people, but it's a sensor which is in the pod that will 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.
00:18:00
Speaker
And there is this other piece that I really like, which is like 100% CT from RIMINI protocol. I don't know if we can call that an input visualization waste. I don't know what you'll take on it. But it's a world performance which is happening through a really long time. And where the data are more collected through the Census Bureau of the CT. Yeah.
00:18:27
Speaker
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
Digital Production and Experimentation
00:18:34
Speaker
get through. So handcraft participation section three is digital production. And Till, I think you're going to. Yeah, so digital production. So after we heard about handcraft and participatory, this is kind of like the new construction techniques section, 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.
00:18:56
Speaker
making chapter because this is where the modern fabrication tools such as a 3D printer or a laser cutter have been used. This is also, I think, different to the creators or the constructors in the other sections is here that there is kind of a shift from the mastery of tools to the mastery of software, which is also how Yvonne Janssen, the section intro writer or author, has described it.
00:19:20
Speaker
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 Gulakier and Ian Guilt. They created a data seeds project it's called. They have little different seed shaped things, little objects, which spin and fall. So you can throw it in there and they're just falling. And this is representing the faults in different age groups.
00:19:50
Speaker
And in their chapter, they are documenting also how many different experimentation 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 these will fall. And I think this kind of vast range of experimentation is also very, very important.
00:20:10
Speaker
Another interesting aspect here is, which also Yvonne has highlighted, is that even though this is digital production, often a manual assembly still has to be done. For example, there's one wage island by Ekini Yoma. And it's, well, first of all, it's a landscape of New York or of Manhattan, and it is submerged in black liquid.
00:20:34
Speaker
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 this acrylic shapes, but then assembled them, glued them together manually. And so this is always kind of this mix of techniques and of approaches.
00:20:59
Speaker
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. That was a beautiful tale. Beautiful. We'll just go straight to Wes. Okay. Actuation, which is a great name for this section. So Wes.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, so actuation is us trying to collect a set of projects that build on some of the things that we saw in the previous section. They're 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.
00:21:34
Speaker
and in a bunch of different contexts. And so we have a couple of projects that are thinking about these as 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.
00:21:57
Speaker
And then another couple of projects that are a little bit more public, so ones that have tennis and road charts from some folks at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. The design of these really cool physical bar charts and pie charts that could move dynamically in responses to survey inputs from people on the street. And then there's an even bigger more architectural scale one.
00:22:20
Speaker
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 are hanging in an atrium. So you get this sort of big sweeping effect through the space every time a plane lands or takes off. I'm 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. Right.
00:22:49
Speaker
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 the Zuids project from Matthew LeGock and his collaborators that's starting to think about, well, what if you
00:23:18
Speaker
tried 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 this is really the like the most bleeding edge points in the space of data physicalization right now. But it kind of points to this future in which, you know, people are imagining
00:23:42
Speaker
programmable matter of visualizations and places in 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 do there. 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 reminds me. But it's also interesting, before we get to the last section, it is interesting because
00:24:11
Speaker
I remember one of the earlier big data visualization projects that caught my eye was Aaron Coblin's flight patterns project, where he tracked flight paths over the US airspace. And this is taking that project and installing it.
00:24:30
Speaker
in 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 you, Wes, is working through this project, like, do you reflect back on like 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. I mean, we've
00:24:55
Speaker
a pretty short period of time we've gone from like using processing to building sculptures and airports. Well, the kind of crazy thing about that is that the airfield project is actually probably pretty close to contemporaneous.
00:25:09
Speaker
with the other work. It's, it's one of the oldest projects in the book. It's actually old enough that the particular sculpture doesn't exist in the Atlanta airport anymore. Although there is 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. But so I think in many of these cases, we have at least a decade, maybe more of
00:25:34
Speaker
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. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Our last section of the book is environment.
Natural Processes in Data Visualization
00:25:55
Speaker
Till, I think you're going to cover that one for us, right?
00:25:57
Speaker
I try to. 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. In this case, these projects are using some kind of environmental processes.
00:26:15
Speaker
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 Elina Klaus, Mortz Schaffana, and Scream Marie. And they collected
00:26:32
Speaker
plastic trash on a beach, so debris, which has been floating in the ocean, thrown by humans into or polluted in 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
00:26:55
Speaker
physicalization kind of based on a classic diagram 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 this kind of close connection, semantic relation to that area is existing. And another project is solar totems by Charles Sowers.
00:27:23
Speaker
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.
00:27:38
Speaker
But typically, these are ephemerals. So they're just showing the current time at that current location or place. And what he wanted to do, and there have been also historic apparatus, which are then recording by burning the sunlight over a lens into some kind of tracking device. But typically, the other problem is that the sun over the days, over the weeks,
00:28:07
Speaker
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 digital production or actuation, it had a motor. And so there was a bit of this kind of lens which was shifted day by day
00:28:25
Speaker
by a 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 a no burn track at all, then there were maybe clouds or it was just like winter and so on. And this is
00:28:45
Speaker
has been put of this kind of burn trick is in large wooden stems, 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 sun rays over the here is always linear. So it's like a super complex mechanism to
00:29:13
Speaker
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.
00:29:29
Speaker
One of the things that I find really fascinating in the environmental part, it's 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 blow a little bit my mind. So every time I'm like, no thinking of a visualization saying, how can I use the force of the world to make, to update my visualization? What will be the process for that?
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah. 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
00:30:29
Speaker
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. Right. OK, so thank you for that review. And folks should obviously check out the book so they can see all of the the images and the pictures. And there is a company website that has a whole bunch of resources, which we'll talk about when we get to the end.
Appeal of Data Physicalization
00:30:54
Speaker
So with all of this 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? I mean, you've talked about these different approaches, but whenever I go to a conference or have conversations like this, people get very excited about it. Is it the fact that
00:31:16
Speaker
on our computers too much? Is it that, you know, maybe we're all nerds sitting behind our computer? Like, what is it that you think is so appealing about any of these different projects?
00:31:28
Speaker
I could 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
00:31:57
Speaker
you know, 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
00:32:19
Speaker
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.
00:32:32
Speaker
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 trash 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.
00:33:00
Speaker
And I think the things about accessibility is really a strong thing. 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... 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
00:33:27
Speaker
If my grandma wants to make a chart, it's probably a better way to do it. I think every type of tool that we are using to represent data will bias
00:33:43
Speaker
us in one way or in another, right? If you are using Excel, you have a list of buttons with a list of pre-made visualizations, right? And when you are doing visualization, you are representing data physically. You will maybe have other bias, but it will be also really interesting to explore
00:34:01
Speaker
different way you might represent this data because all the tools that you will use will probably afford other approach 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.
00:34:21
Speaker
Because we have this super powerful tool. We can take this really big bunch of data and just apply this idiom and then, oh, whoa, suddenly it's here. But with physicalization, you will have to manipulate all of this element and think about what type of material, what type of idioms. And even you don't have predefined idioms, so you have to invent it maybe. So that's also one of the things which make it really exciting to me.
00:34:48
Speaker
So are any of you...
00:34:53
Speaker
creating data, physical products, projects. I don't want to say products that makes it sounds like a shop, but like doing projects, um, either personally or professionally, maybe in teaching. I know Laura, you had mentioned one as we were getting ready for this. That was sounded pretty meditative. Yeah. Well, while I was in sabbatical, um, I was doing a lot of data crochet. So I, I mean, I have a lot of tools at my disposal, but I was traveling and I wanted a way of making things that was very portable.
00:35:20
Speaker
So for crochet, all you need is yarn, which you can find at your local thrift store, craft store, and a crochet hook, which is, again, super small and portable. And so while in 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're readable. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes you get lost. It happens.
00:35:47
Speaker
Currently, I've got a student, Sydney Pratt, who's been thinking a lot about wearables. So she builds fashion tech usually. And so she's been thinking a lot about how do you create 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
00:36:07
Speaker
Um, 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, having a collar or having sort of, um, it's sort of, it's this like male, like chain male kind of structure come on edge, um, 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.
00:36:37
Speaker
So also thinking about not just the physicality of it, but the context. So is this something that sits on your shelf? Is this something that you're wearing? Is there a story behind what you're trying to communicate as you're making something that might be unseen now is 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.
00:37:05
Speaker
Do you have been running the class now? Yes, exactly. Maybe connecting that. Also the readability issue, but also the perceptibility or how the whole senses we have could be used. Besides the classical visual variables like position, size and color, we also use from visualization or no from visualization.
00:37:27
Speaker
Now we have all the haptic, the tactile, the kinesthetic variables for our use. And Ivaronika 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.
00:37:56
Speaker
In our class on physicalization, one student group, they created a project physicalizing critical alcohol consumption in Germany.
00:38:09
Speaker
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 ready-made actual wine bottles and fill them with two liquids colored for female and male consumption percentages. So it's kind of like a stacked
00:38:29
Speaker
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 deploys an employee, sorry, rather, maybe a rather simple metaphor, hey, bottles and liquids is
00:38:58
Speaker
alcohol or the theme about that, which is intentional 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 risky 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 risk level connect to the experience people have with data objects. Yeah.
00:39:29
Speaker
Um, I wanted to ask a lot of the, um, we talked about the airport installation a little bit, but, but a lot of these other pieces you could 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 data is field needs to learn a little bit more from museum curators?
00:39:55
Speaker
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. And 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
00:40:19
Speaker
clever way to work with data because you can, 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, so like, you know, 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 data of this field and museum curators that can work together in this space.
00:40:44
Speaker
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, OK, but now how do you interact with that object? And some of it's sort of passive. 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?
00:41:10
Speaker
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's
00:41:31
Speaker
It translates from our existing interactions with things. 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 data set 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,
00:41:58
Speaker
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.
00:42:22
Speaker
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're trying to get people engaged and interacting with the subject matter on a very visceral level. I definitely feel like there's a lot to be learned, especially from next time you walk around a science museum and think about, okay,
00:42:46
Speaker
If the Air and Space Museum just had a giant display and an 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 very different
00:43:08
Speaker
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.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah, I will get one more plug to the Air and Space Museum. For those who don't know and are visiting D.C., 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, Laura, you actually can like touch the space shuttle and stand below it and like
00:43:44
Speaker
It's a normity. Yeah. OK, 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. I don't know. What would we call it? Like kind of like a ridgeline chart, kind of out of you have it with you right now.
00:44:09
Speaker
Why again, Freddie? Oh, he's got it. OK. Well, this is great. So while Sam grabs the model, it's kind of like a ridgeline chart kind of out of 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 OK. Oh, so it's an actual OK. So what? OK. So, Sam, what do you what do you got here? Oh, yes.
00:44:39
Speaker
Maybe I'm pretty sure Wes and Laura would be better at describing it. Yeah. Wes, do you want to take a go? I can ask you. Yeah. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do for the cover of this book. 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.
00:45:02
Speaker
And what we have is a Ridgeline plot 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'll have to see, I think you have the soft cover copy of this, John. If you flip the soft cover back to the page, a few pages in,
00:45:27
Speaker
that has the title and you actually get a legend for the book as well. So you can see which one of the book is on the front is which one of the chapters of the book. And so we have this little kind of simple physical, physicalization interaction that anybody who has a soft cover version of the book can experience too.
00:45:44
Speaker
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. Oh, okay. Very smart. Very smart. Oh, I see. Yes. Okay. And maybe a plaque. We have a whole blog post on the design.
00:46:02
Speaker
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.
00:46:17
Speaker
Which by the way, 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
00:46:37
Speaker
I don't know a fun aspect maybe but it's also a bit of a weird thing that we have it now a book it's it's dead three flat documentation of all these physical objects and we discussed about this before how we perceive these objects and and the different scales and now they're all little pictures in a
00:46:56
Speaker
well, 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 for all about all these different physicalizations and also from different scales. So maybe within a museum and out in the city scale in the world. Yeah. I mean, it is also true. Right. That Sam is the only one of the four of you who actually gets to hold that has that that piece. Right. Which I don't know. Maybe you're all annoyed at Sam. I don't know. But like, you know, there's there's that part.
00:47:25
Speaker
There's no part of it, too. I know that he just doesn't perennially have it in the background. It should be hanging on his wall framed beautifully. That's what annoys me. It should be on his part, Sam. Yeah. 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 ordered and one which is ordered. So we can cut it and then we're going to have four physicalizations.
00:47:54
Speaker
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.
00:48:12
Speaker
Exactly. 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 section intros connecting the different ideas and concepts of the
00:48:38
Speaker
of the projects and of the chapters within each section. And we are also having a blog there where we're 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 a dark stool. We started also interviewing the people there.
00:49:04
Speaker
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 Laura 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 projects and the construction processes.
00:49:26
Speaker
and so this template also people can find on the website and we're describing also how we designed that 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 with this kind of alco-physicalization, they also use that template and this gives them on others the opportunity to
00:49:47
Speaker
think in a bit more structured way on the objects, on the challenges 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.
00:50:06
Speaker
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, what would your
00:50:23
Speaker
Do you have a recommendation for how people should think about this to get started? Because not everybody has a maker lab, not everybody knows how to bend pipe. 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. What would you say?
00:50:37
Speaker
I think that 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.
00:51:00
Speaker
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. When, 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.
00:51:30
Speaker
And if you make a physicalization and you use a template to document it, please send it to us. The story 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.
00:51:48
Speaker
That's terrific. So we've got a physical manifestation. It's like very meta pulling all these experiences and these projects together. Terrific. So Laura West, Sam Till, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been fantastic. Congrats on the great book. And I'll send you pictures of my physical database projects soon. All right. So thanks all for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you.
00:52:16
Speaker
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 Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:52:45
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the policy of this podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs, audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs, design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-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.
00:53:06
Speaker
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