Supporting the Design and Fabrication of Physical Visualizations

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Conglei Shi, Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, Lora Oehlberg and Jean-Daniel Fekete

Physical visualizations created with our fabrication tool, MakerVis: a) a layered scatterplot modeled after Rosling ; b) a prism map showing relative happiness in US states computed from Twitter sentiments; c), d), e) layered bar charts and line charts crafted by end users.

Abstract

Physical visualizations come in increasingly diverse forms, and are used in domains including art and entertainment, busi­ ness analytics, and scientific research. However, creating physical visualizations requires laborious craftsmanship and demands expertise in both data visualization and digital fab­ rication. We present three case studies that illustrate limita­ tions of current visualization fabrication workflows. We then present MakerVis, a prototype tool that integrates the entire process of creating physical visualizations, from data filter­ ing to physical fabrication. Design sessions with three end users demonstrate how tools such as MakerVis can dramati­ cally lower the barriers to producing physical visualizations. Observations and interviews from these sessions highlighted future research areas, including customization support, using material properties to represent data variables, and allowing the reuse of physical data objects in new visualizations.

Materials

Citation