Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada Information-Bombing: Confronting the Public to Civic Data Nina Valkanova Moritz Behrens Copenhagen Institute of UCL The Bartlett Interaction Design University College London Copenhagen, Denmark London, UK [email protected] [email protected] Sandy Claes Andrew Vande Moere Research[x]Design Research[x]Design KU Leuven KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium Leuven, Belgium [email protected] [email protected] Abstract This short pictorial paper offers a succinct overview and discussion on an drastically alternative perspective of providing data-driven tools for the visualization of personally relevant data. We describe the notion of information bombing, the situated, playful and opportunistic approach to share information in the public realm. We thus present a wide range of related and self-initiated works in this realm, in order to demonstrate the rich possibilities of exposing and externalizing situated data in existing social, cultural and physical environments, which are the actual source of such data. Authors Keywords Authors’ choice; of terms; separated; by semi-colons Mandatory section to be included in your final version. ACM Classification Keywords Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DIS ‘14, June 21-25, 2014 Vancouver, BC, Canada Copyright © 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-1482-4/12/10... $15.00” H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Introduction Coined by artist Zach Lieberman, the term projection bombing denotes the use of some sort of mobile or portable light projector to display compelling content within a public environment. The projection bombing technique seems to be a relatively effective and exciting way of reaching a wide, lay audience, mainly by catching urban passers-by by surprise during their everyday activities. In recent years, projection bombing has been particularly Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada exploited by street art and civic participation kinds of initatives due to its technical simplicity, financial affordability and thought-provoking, guerillastyle - yet still relatively ‘legal’ (at least in comparison to traditional grafitti spraying) - nature of communication. Whereas the ‘projected’ content has commonly been focused on showing forms of artistic expression, recent initatives on civic participation and information awareness have been using similar techniques to introduce abstract information and facts in our everyday urban environments. These public, data-centric interventions have not necessarily been limited to the use of projection technology. Many alternatives have been proposed, ranging from infographics drawn on the pavement with simple chalk, to dynamic, light-emitting media architecture installations. What most of these approaches have in common is the purpose to reach a wide audience in an opportunistic way, by ways of somewhat unconventional yet always positive and playful interventions in public space. In The projection bombs by Grafitti Lab ranged from classic tags on famous monuments to humorously manufactured conversations painted on residential exterior walls. Source: http://www.graffitiresearchlab.com Nuage Vert (Green Cloud) was a city-scale light installation representing the actual energy consumption of a coal burning power plant. Source: http://hehe.org2.free.fr/ The Infovis Grafitti kit by artist Golan Levin consisted of an adjustable lasercut stencil, suitable for the rapid deployment of pie-chart infographics in the street. Source: http://www.flong.com/ Data data data by artist group Stanza is a live, real time information visualisation of the connected city space, based on various data sensors in the city. Source: http://www.stanza.co.uk/data/ Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada addition, the situated use of the physical environment as an information canvas has been exploited for a rich, experiential context that tends to augment the relevance, situatedness and socio-cultural interpretation of the content that is shown [8]. We therefore believe that guerrilla-style forms of public dissemination could form a feasible communication medium for offering engaging, situated experiences of data that reach well beyond the typical individualized and screen-focused experiences of today. During the Occupy protests, mobile projectors were used to project the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan of the movement Source: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk A museum in Dresden, Germany recently showed a projection of proportions of foreigners in the city. Source: Museen der Stadt Dresden (Facebook) Households in Tidy Street, Brighton, UK, produced an street infographic to reduce their electricity consumption. Source: http://tidystreet.org/index.php The art project Watermarks projects future water levels onto street facades exploring the topic of climate change. Source: http://watermarksproject.org Projection Bombing as Public Data Visualization In our previous work, we took inspiration from street art practice [3] to experiment with various forms of public information ‘bombing’. For instance, in Neighborhood Scoreboards [9], we exposed the energy usage statistics of multiple households on chalkboards on the facades of their homes, in order to evaluate the impact of this social exposure on their energy consumption behavior. In Street Infographics [2], we connected casual infovis illus- Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada trations to existing street signs in an urban neighbourhood to inform residents on the actual socio-demographic compositions as misconceptions. We measured their impact, such as whether these interventions influenced the existing local misconceptions. We also developed, Architectural Bombing, a mobile projection bombing installation of our own to experience firsthand its potential capabilities and issues. The visualizations showed various socio-demograph facts and relationships from the actual street the installation was located in. As a primary design challenge, we aimed to design the visualizations so that the infographics physically ‘mapped’ unto the unique features of the local house facades. The installation consisted of a rudementary cart on wheels, with a common projector, laptop computer and a GPS-equipped smart phone. The cart was wheeled along the street, and the content shown changed dynamically according to the specific facade that was passed by. As a result, a garage door acted as the structural backdrop for a treemap of Top: Neighborhood Scoreboards displayed the energy usage of individual households on their house facades [9]. Bottom: Street infographics displayed local socio-demographic information to counter local misconceptions [2]. Architectural Bombing. Top: A network diagram showing immigrating and emigrating inhabitants in the street. Bottom: A treemap diagram compared the household compositions (i.e. number of adults and children per house) versus the surface areas of these houses. Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada The mobile projection cart with the immigration map mapped unto the bricks of house facade. The world map revealed the origins of foreign inhabitants of the street . One brick corresponded to one person. Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada household compositions, while the rectangular bricks of another facade formed a pixel-like world map to convey the origins from local inhabitants. In this study, we were particularly interested in the comprehensibility and usefulness of the communication method. Self-contributed Visualization Public We have also investigated the impact of public visualization when self-contributed citizen data, i.e. data submitted by the citizens themselves, is projected publicly. Reveal-it! was an interactive visualization of comparative individual and community data, originating from participants, based on self-reported mobile data entry., Here, we investigated how onlookers engaged with the public visualizations of data originating from themselves, and how this influenced their personal reflections and collective discussions [5]. We also studied how interactive social visualizations influence the participation and deliberative discourse in public settings [7]. MyPosition was an interactive visualization of individual opinions, originating from pass- Reveal-it! [5] Top: visualization of the comparative energy consumptions of individuals and communities projected in a street in Madrid, Spain. Bottom: neighborhood visualization in a civic center in Barcelona, Spain. Passers-by and visitors can participate via mobile data entry. MyPosition [7]. Top: A visualization of the public opinion towards a socio-political question related to the neighborhood, on a 4-point scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree). Each tile corresponds to an individually contributed vote. Bottom: MyPosition deployed in a lounge space. Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada ers-by, and based on gesture interaction. It demonstrated how the identifiability of individual contributions as well as playful interaction and representation modalities support or hamper meaningful participation. We also examined the social interaction patterns caused by the visualization in its larger physical context [7]. Novel Tools for Data Collection and Display We expanded the idea of urban visualization by not only looking at the impact of the public visualization of citizen data, but also by investigating more active strategies for citizen-driven data collection. For instance, the Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard (SCSD) was an interactive and participatory urban visualization installation that explored the benefits of combining tangible, DIY urban interactive devices, with the opportunistic visual prominence of media facades [1]. The interactive technology was based on simple switch and knob components, combined with a (more and more ubiquitous) travel card, based on Fig. 1 An interactive device (top and middle left) enables people to vote on various topics related to their cities and visualize their opinion immediately (right). The large-scale urban visualization is can be experienced from different social spots around the site, such as the side-walk, the cars, the bus-stop or metro entrance (bottom left). Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada The Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard: Visuallization of people’s opinion on the topic of security in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil [1]. The iconographic choice (in this case, a lock) was based on a workshop with citizen groups, where different iconographic symbols of city related concept were discussed. Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada The Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard experimented with the idea of adaptabe DIY interfaces for bottom-up, situated collection of citizen-data, by exploring ways of letting citizens set the voting topics themselves, using custom laser-cutted interface components. VoxBox also explored adaptable DIY interfaces for data collection. It offers a playful alternative to gauge public opinion on a range of topics, draws people to it and allows people to engage as a group, making it a social experience. Source: http://www.voxboxproject.com/ The Fair Numbers projects communicates and compares subjective and objective data of noisiness and crowdedness, gathered via the sensors, tablets and photos, by a minimalistic hour-by-hour non-digital public visualization using tape. Source: http://lisakoeman.nl/ RFID technology. The project made use of DIY components and smart technology beyond travel purposes and allowed citizens to express their mood and opinion instantly in the technology mediated urban realm. As such, the project explored novel ways to motivate and engage citizens with the discussion of issues and challenges in their city, by letting them submit and visualize in real-time their opinions. Discussion This short pictorial paper offers a succinct overview and discussion on a radically different perspective of data-driven tools for the visualization of personally relevant data. We described the notion of information bombing, the situated, playful and opportunistic appoach to share personal information in the public. In our work, we demonstrate inspiration by a range of artistically motivated, activist or participatory projects and interventions related to civic data and public space, by their approach of opportunistic augmentation of public spaces with abstract, metaphorical representations of socially- or locally-relevant data, thus seeking to raise awareness and provoke debate and participation in a shared and social context. We present a wide range of related and own works in this realm, in order to demonstrate the possibilities of exposing and externalizing locally relevant data in existing social and physical environments, which are the actual source of such data. With our projects we touch upon a range of digital and non-digital display materials (e.g. projections, LED facades, street plates, chalkboards), explore the possibilities for architectural adaptation of data visualizations, and experiment with different ways of data representations, as well as aqcuisition of self-contributed, personal data (from mobile and gestural interfaces to playful DIY tangible devices for urban participation). Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada While our experience in designing and deploying public visualization highlights the potential of opportunistically confronting the public with civic data, we believe that a valuable, and necessary next step would be to provide citizens with the necessary knowledge and tools to adopt this approach for themselves. Future research could investigate the range of functionalities, tools and interfaces that facilitate the empowerment of common citizens to create their own interfaces for information bombing as well as tools for acquisition, production and adaptation of data-driven visualizations. Some of the following research directions can thus be explored: adaptable DIY interaces for the bottomup, situated collection of citizen-data; citizen-driven digital fabrication tools for the production of physical data visualizations (physicalizations) for public use; and mechatronic, non-digital, and tangible materials for novel display creation and deployment. Acknowledgements We wish to thank Jan Lens for developing the prototype visualization bombing installation. References [1] Behrens, M., Valkanova, N., Fatah gen Schieck, A., and Brumby, D. Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard: A Case Study Into Media Architectural Interfaces. In Proc. of PerDis’14. [2] Claes, S., and Vande Moere A. Street Infographics: Raising Awareness for Local Social Issues through a Situated Display, In Proc. PerDis’13, ACM, pp. 133-138. [3] Claes S. and Vande Moere A. What Public Visualization Can Learn From Street Art, Leonardo Journal. 2015. Accepted for publication [4] Klemmer, R.S., Thomsen, M., Phelps-Goodman, E., Lee, R. and Landay, J.A. Where do web sites come from? Capturing and interacting with design history. In Proc. CHI 2002, ACM Press (2002), 1-8. [5] Valkanova, N., Jorda, S., Tomitsch, M., and Vande Moere, A. Reveal-It!: The Impact of a Social Visualization Projection on Public Awareness and Discourse. In Proc. of CHI’13, p. 3461–3470. [6] Valkanova, N., Jorda, S., and Vande Moere, A. The Public Visualization of Citizen Data: Design, Impact and Implications. In IJHCS, Special Issue on Transdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Computing. Accepted for publication [7] Valkanova, N., Walter, R., Müller, J., and Vande Moere, A. MyPosition: Sparking Civic Discourse by a Public Interactive Poll Visualization. In Proc. of CSCW’14, [8] Vande Moere A. and Hill D. (2012), “Designing for the Situated and Public Visualization of Urban Data”, Journal of Urban Technology, 19(2), pp. 25-46. [9] Vande Moere A., Tomitsch M., Hoinkis M., Trefz E., Johansen S., and Jones A. Comparative Feedback in the Street: Exposing Residential Energy Consumption on House Facades, In Proc. INTERACT’11 (2011). Pictorials DIS 2014: Crafting Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada
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