Uta Hinrichs

Jinrui Wang, Alexis Pister, Sian Phillips et al.

This paper reports on the process of designing the UK Co-Benefits Atlas, which communicates and publicizes data for climate mitigation. Visualization atlases -- an emerging type of platform to make data about complex topics comprehensive through interactive visualizations and explanatory content -- pose challenges beyond traditional visualization projects. Atlases must address diverse and often uncertain audiences and use cases, support both explanatory and guided exploration, and accommodate complex, evolving data. Over 10 months, our team of visualization and domain experts conducted 8 design workshops, iterative prototyping, 15 stakeholder onboarding sessions, and continuous reflection. These intertwined processes informed the development of the Atlas, comprising over 400 pages of visualizations and explanations. They also enabled a deeper understanding of how stakeholders may critically engage with the atlas in practice, in terms of interests, potential frictions when navigating huge amounts of data, and envisioned usage scenarios. Reflecting on our design process, we identify five driving forces in atlas design -- data, people, stories, context, and the atlas itself -- whose shifting dynamics influence different stages of visualization atlas design in different ways. Grounded in our case study, we discuss using these forces as a conceptual starting point for structuring and reflecting on future atlas design processes.

Tomas Vancisin, Mary Orr, Uta Hinrichs

Transcription, annotation, digitization and/or visualization are common transformations that historical documents such as national records, birth/death registers, university records, letters or books undergo. Reasons for those transformations span from the (physical) protection of the original materials to disclosure of 'hidden' information or patterns within the documents. Even though such transformations bring new insights and perspectives on the documents, they also modify the documents' content, structure, and/or artifactual form and thus, occlude prior knowledge and interpretation. When it comes to visualization as a means to transform historical documents from written to abstract visual form, there is typically little acknowledgment or even understanding of the previous transformation steps these documents have gone through. The 'tremendous rhetorical force' of visualization, we argue, should not be at the expense of the multiple pasts, contexts, and curators that are inherent in historical record collections. Rather, the urgent question for the fields of visualization and the (digital) humanities is how to better support awareness of these multiple layers of interpretation and the people behind them when representing historical documents. We begin to address this question based on a collection of historical university records by (a) investigating common transformation processes of historical documents, and (b) discussing opportunities and challenges for making such transformations transparent through what we call 'provenance-driven visualization'; the idea for a visualization that makes visible the layers of transformation (including interpretation, re-structuring, and curation) inherent in historical documents.

Kyle Wm. Hall, Adam J. Bradley, Uta Hinrichs et al.

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that advance all disciplines involved. In this paper we introduce and define a new methodological paradigm we call design by immersion, which provides an alternative perspective on problem-driven visualization work. Design by immersion embeds transdisciplinary experiences at the center of the visualization process by having visualization researchers participate in the work of the target domain (or domain experts participate in visualization research). Based on our own combined experiences of working on cross-disciplinary, problem-driven visualization projects, we present six case studies that expose the opportunities that design by immersion enables, including (1) exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces, (2) enriching domain understanding through personal experiences, and (3) building strong transdisciplinary relationships. Furthermore, we illustrate how the process of design by immersion opens up a diverse set of design activities that can be combined in different ways depending on the type of collaboration, project, and goals. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential pitfalls of design by immersion.