sustain

Tobias Skog, Sara Ljungblad and Lars Erik Holmquist
IEEE InfoVis 2003

This paper describes the authors’s experience in designing ambient information visualization based on Mondrian’s artwork. They describe how they used this artwork to base the encoding of their designs in order to improve their aesthetic appeal. The same project also introduced the term of Informative Art [Redström et al. 2000, Holmquist & Skog 2003]. The used the Mondrian artwork to create visualizations of three types of data: email traffic in an office, weather data (in selected cities in the world and forecast for a particular city), and bus traffic information.

A painting by Piet Mondrian

• When displaying email traffic, the square in the artwork were mapped to individual users, with their size reflecting the amount of emails that were sent by or to the user. It was deployed in a public space of the office to reflect the level of activity. Color of the square was assigned randomly at startup, while the position of the square defined a particular user.
• When displaying world weather, the size of the square reflected the current temperature in the city, while the color indicated weather conditions. The positions of the squares were chosen to reflect their geographical situation with respect to a classical world map. The display was deployed in a conference, as a demonstration (SIGGRAPH 2001).
• When displaying local weather forecast, the color and size mapping of the squares were similar to the previous example, but the position served to reflect forecast distance. The upper left corner square displayed current values, while the upper right corner square reflected next day’s forecast. The lower left corner and lower middle, and the lower right corner squares displayed forecast for the following three days, left to right. The display was deployed at the University of Gothenburg for one week. The researchers gathered feedback from students.
• When displaying bus departure information, the color and size indicated the time before the bus departed. In particular, the sizes of the squares were calibrated based on the time needed to walk from the display to the bus stop. The positions of the squares indicated both geographical mapping (where the bus is situated based on an approximate campus map) and time mapping (first departing bus on top, next departing on bottom). To make position mapping easier to read, the researchers added landmark features in the visualization (a river). The display was deployed for 15 days (10 of actual running time) in a public area close to the main exit of a particular department. During the deployment, researchers gathered feedback from 6 users of the space regarding their use of the visualization.

On the bus departure information display, researchers interviewed participants asking:

1. If they knew that it was not only art, but there was data on it,
2. If they knew what type of data was displayed,
3. If they knew how to read the data from it.

Based on these experiences, the authors provide 4 lessons learned:

1. By finding information that is relevant to the place where the ambient display is located, every person spending time in the space is a potential user.
2. The rate of change in the information should be frequent enough to promote relevance, but the developer can affect the visual appearance by slowing down the changes or adding a small amount of information.
3. Basing a visualization on an artistic style need not hinder – and might even support – the readability and comprehension of an ambient infovis installation.
4. Letting features of the information source affect the visual encoding, thus providing a mnemonic to remember the mapping, is a good way to support the comprehension of the display.

I think that more could be done to ground the evaluation of such device in the actual practice. The approach based on an artwork seems interesting though, instead of starting from a very CS representation and then making it look nice.

Related posts:

1. Imprint, a Community Visualization of Printer Data : Designing for Open-ended Engagement on Sustainability
2. Casual Information Visualization : Depictions of Data in Everyday Life
3. A Taxonomy of Ambient Information Systems: Four Patterns of Design
4. The Power-Aware Cord: Energy Awareness Through Ambient Information Display
5. Flowers as Tangible Ambient Displays for Home Energy Feedback

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Ambient Displays, Product Design, Visualizations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.