Research: Casual Information Visualization

My research interests concern how we can apply techniques from infovis to new domains, specifically domains away from the office. What infovis tools and techniques can be used in the home, or out walking along a street? Much of modern life is weighed down by ever-increasing streams of information, and ever-larger personal repositories of information. Our photo collections, email archives, and bookmarks are growing out of control. Another trend is that, because so much of modern life is mediated by computational artifacts, we leave digital traces in the physical and virtual worlds that can be recorded and used later for rememberance and reflection. But how exactly can we bring the powerful tools of infovis to bear on personal data, informal users, and casual situations of use?

We cannot apply infovis techniques wholesale to casual situations. Infovis has, at its core, a different model of human-computer interaction, different user populations, and different goals. The domain of traditional infovis research is work. The goal of information visualization is to amplify human cognition, or, said another way, to produce analytic insight for these work tasks [2,15]. Information analysts and other information workers need tools to amplify their cognition as they go about solving data-intensive problems in their domains of expertise (from finding terrorists to finding patterns in the stock market, to medical discovery). These users are typically domain experts, who are experienced in analytical problem solving, and sometimes even experienced users of particular interactive visualization techniques.

Some systems have been built to bring traditional visualization techniques to personal data and non-work tasks. Bederson’s PhotoMesa uses space-filling treemaps to organize the directories and images in a personal photo library [1]. Slife (from slifelabs) creates timeline visualizations of application usage on personal computers [14].

Some prior systems bring visualizations of data into the environment as ambient information systems. I note Dahley et al.’s water lamp and pinwheels [3], Heiner et al.’s information percolator [5], and Stasko et al.’s InfoCanvas [13] as some examples of this domain. Beyond doing active development on the InfoCanvas during my Masters work, I synthesized these three and 16 other systems in a taxonomy of ambient information systems that contains four design dimensions and uncovers four design patterns for ambient systems development [9].

My goal is to present ambient information systems and other non-work uses uses of information visualization as a complement to traditional infovis research thrusts. I (along with John Stasko and Michael Mateas) argue for this complement, which we term “Casual Information Visualization”, in a submission to InfoVis 2007 [11]. Our contribution in that paper is articulating vocabulary for describing these edge cases, defining casual infovis, and then discussing implications for design and evaluation.

In my future research I hope to continue investigations along these lines. First, I think my contributions will be in further articulating theoretical ways to understand how individuals manage information, make sense of their worlds (sensemaking is also a research thrust in more traditional infovis research), and use technology and visualization to produce insight. Related to this question, Matthews et al. used Activity Theory as a lens to investigate peripheral displays [8]. I want to go further in articulating what casual infovis systems can tell us about the phenomenological “felt life” of technology. This theoretical project is in line with Dourish’s Where the Action Is [4] and McCarthy and Wright’s Technology as Experience [7]. Many casual infovis systems are intended to support reflection, contemplation, and insight. I take inspiration from Reflective Design [12] as a fruitful way to continue exploring these ideas from a theoretical perspective.

Through prototype design and evaluation, I want to contribute design guidance and perhaps even code frameworks for developers of casual infovis systems. I am adding to my “Chat Client” project from CS 6452 a visualization of the content of each instant message. These visualizations will be transmitted to each partner instead of the text itself. As a design riff on PeopleGarden [16], the visualization are simple flowers. These open and ambiguous representations of each message will, we hope, take on meanings and be appropriated into the myriad channels we have for communication. This non-textual channel can, we imagine, still be useful, much in the same what that Kaye’s Intimate Objects [12] are, while ambiguous, still useful.

Further I want to contribute to the evaluation challenges of this emerging field. When it comes to measuring experience, or describing moments of reflection and insight, how can we best do so? I am currently working on a long-term deployment of a casual infovis system into homes around Atlanta. We are evaluating the adoption and satisfaction of interacting for a period of weeks with an art installation called Tableau Machine that creates visual representations of home life. I have planned the study, along with the research team, and I will be the head ethnographer on the project. But I imagine that casual infovis, along with other elements of HCI and HCC that deal with the wide aspects of life, can build better methods and tools for evaluation. I may want to perform an evaluation of evaluation techniques at some point in my research that may uncover a way forward for evaluators to measure the success of their creations. I will present a preliminary suggestion for evaluation of ambient information systems at a workshop at Pervasive 2007 \[10]. This work is based on Hirschheim and Klein’s work on paradigms for systems development [6].

References
1. B. Bederson. Photomesa: a zoomable image browser using quantum treemaps and bubblemaps. In UIST ’01: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 71–80, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM Press.
2. S. K. Card, J. Mackinlay, and B. Shneiderman. Readings in Information Visualization, Using Visualization to Think, chapter 1, pages 1–34. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
3. A. Dahley, C. Wisneski, and H. Ishii. Water lamp and pinwheels: ambient projection of digital information into architectural space. In Proceedings of CHI, extended, 1998.
4. P. Dourish. Where the action is. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001.
5. J. M. Heiner and et. al. The information percolator: Ambient information display in a decorative object. In Proceedings of UIST, pages 141–148, 1999.
6. R. Hirschheim and H. K. Klein. Four paradigms of information systems development. Communications of the ACM, 32(10):1119–1215, October 1989.
7. J. McCarthy and P. Wright. Technology as Experience. MIT Press, 2004.
8. T. Matthews, T. Rattenbury, and S. Carter. Defining, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays: An analysis using activity theory. Human-Computer Interaction Journal, 22(1), 2007.
9. Z. Pousman and J. Stasko. A taxonomy of ambient information systems: Four patterns of design. In Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces, pages 67–74, May 2006.
10. Z. Pousman and J. Stasko. Ambient information systems: Evaluation in two paradigms. Technical report, Pervasive 2007 Workshop on “Ambient Information Systems” (W9), June 2007.
11. [missing ref!]
12. P. Sengers, K. Boehner, S. David, and J. J. Kaye. Reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing 2005 (CC 2005).
13. J. Stasko, T. Miller, Z. Pousman, C. Plaue, and O. Ullah. Personalized peripheral information awareness through information art. In Proceedings of Ubicomp 2004, pages 18–35, 2004.
14. Slife Labs, LLC. Slife Features.
15. J. J. van Wijk. Views on visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 12(4):421–432, July/August 2006.
16. R. Xiong and J. Donath. Peoplegarden: creating data portraits for users. In Proceedings of UIST (Symposium on User interface software and technology), pages 37–44, New York, NY, USA, 1999.