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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
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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
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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/
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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-
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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).
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