Despite increasing interest in Hybrid Digital Boardgames (HDBs) that necessarily combine smart technology with a physical board- game, little is known about how the design of hybrid functions impacts player experience (PX). Additionally, it is unclear whether existing, videogame-centric, PX measures apply to tabletop set- tings. We designed a mixed-methods study to examine the PX of a boardgame in both its published form and as a custom HDB. We learned that players’ expectations of the “core” gameplay influence their perceptions of technology, highlighting a balance between the values and drawbacks of hybridity in relation to its impact on their sense of autonomy, fairness, and challenge in play. Our results also highlight methodological considerations for future tabletop PX studies, and suggest the existence of a Goldilocks Factor where the game offers “just right” hybridity that satisfies players without impacting core gameplay.
Public-facing data visualizations can play a vital role in making complex information clear and engaging, thereby encouraging informed public discourse and participation. However, existing work offers limited insight into how practitioners make design decisions based on their envisioned target audiences and across different media channels. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals from journalistic settings, focusing on how they conceptualize their readers, translate these notions into design choices, and evaluate their work. We found that practitioners often rely on broad audience definitions, despite considering ``knowing their readers'' essential. Evaluation primarily relies on peer feedback or social metrics rather than user testing. From these accounts, we identify recurring strategies employed to reach general, often undefined publics. We discuss implications for audience-centered authoring tools, proposing features such as persona simulations and content-adaptive multi-format authoring, message-first rhetoric-aware workflows, and lightweight in-tool evaluation to better support the realities of public-facing design.
Data physicalization, which encodes data in physical form, has been increasingly used to engage the public with issues of social good. While public engagement is often invoked as a motivation or expected outcome, it has not been systematically examined as a design objective. This gap raises two key challenges: what characterizes engagement in data physicalization for social good (Phys4Good), and how it can be effectively designed. In this work, we address these challenges by first curating a corpus of 45 Phys4Good projects and deriving a design space structured around a modified three-act framework comprising Stage, Encounter, and Impact. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with designers of eight projects to identify recurring challenges and strategies for fostering engagement. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our design space and strategies through a case study, which showed that they can guide designers in structuring engagement, anticipating barriers, and creating more impactful Phys4Good experiences.
Data visualization benefits from non-visual cues to enable people to understand information by engaging with it through multimodality, yet most approaches rely on cumbersome technologies or large scale artifacts, making them difficult to adapt to dynamic or complex datasets. In this paper, we explore the use of cutaneous haptics as a lightweight quantitative channel for visualization tasks, allowing users to feel data and interact with it dynamically. We present Haptixel, an open-source DIY encountered-type wearable providing force-feedback on the users' fingertips' pulp. We propose an interaction framework illustrating how Haptixel can be used to complement visualization tasks through combinations of force levels and contact types. We evaluate our approach in a pixel-art-like VR user study (n=16) where pixels color/height are associated to forces as a univariate value mapping. Results show that participants can retrieve information with Haptixel, and significantly discriminate 3D-data with at least four levels of forces; suggesting that cutaneous force-feedback can function for quantitative distinctions in visualization tasks.
While it is proven that the individual construction of a data physicalization aids personal sense-making, little is known about how sense-making is negotiated when it is shared by multiple, co-located participants. Since participatory data physicalization can inadvertently prioritize dominant views, we interpreted data feminism principles to design a collaborative physicalization construction process that empowers stakeholders and participants to co-determine how meanings are represented. This process revealed how the interplay of physical and non-physical actions during construction negotiations supported collaborative sense-making among 14 groups of 55 participants during 4 workshops, enabling us to articulate how explicit power is embodied by the physicalization artifact and negotiated between authoring and collaborating participants, and facilitators; whereas tacit power operates through artifact meanings, participant identity and design decisions. By providing one operationalization of data-feminist critique into the form of design requirements, our contributions support the design of more equitable physicalization and visualization construction methods.
Existing toolkits for data physicalization prioritize ease of use and adoption by novices. This is often achieved by limiting the affordances of the materials used and constraining design possibilities. The result is limited opportunities for creating expressive physicalizations. To address this limitation and to better understand how to support the creation process of expressive physicalizations, we created \textit{ClayPhys}, a low-fidelity data physicalization toolkit designed to encourage making expressive data physicalizations. Our toolkit consists of clay, clay work tools, instruction and documentation handbooks, and warm-up activities that scaffold the design process. We studied the use of \textit{ClayPhys} in a one-day workshop with nine expert participants. From our analysis of participants’ created data physicalizations, we observed that using \textit{ClayPhys}, participants could map data to different visual and physical variables, and that their designs incorporated various data interaction styles. Informed by our findings, we discuss implications for designing higher-fidelity expressive data physicalization toolkits.
We introduce the notion of an Active Proxy interface, i.e. tangible models as proxies for physical data referents, supporting interactive exploration of data through active manipulation. We realise an active proxy data visualisation system, ``MarioChart", using robot carts relocating themselves on a tabletop, e.g., to align with their data referents in a map or other visual layout. We consider a casual-data exploration scenario involving a multivariate campus sustainability dataset, using scale models as proxies for their physical building data referents. Our empirical study (n=12) compares active proxy use with conventional tablet interaction, finding that our active proxy system enhances short-term spatial memory of data and enables faster completion of certain data analytic tasks. It shows no significant differences compared to traditional touchscreens in long-term memory, physical fatigue, mental workload, or user engagement. Our study offers an initial baseline for active proxy techniques and advances understanding of tangible interfaces in situated data visualisation.