Advancing Interactive Physicalizations

Physicalizations—physical representations of data—are one of the emerging beyond-the-desktop visualizations where users can interact with data beyond the traditional desktop, keyboard, and mouse setup. Despite the benefits physicalizations offer, physicalizations are often viewed as one-off solutions due to three challenges. First, most physicalizations are static representations that do not support common data interactions (e.g., selecting, filtering). Non-interactive physicalizations are essentially static images of datasets, reducing data expressiveness and inhibiting data exploration. This lack of interactivity feeds into the second challenge where many physicalizations lack a tight integration with current digital practices (e.g., analysts often draw insights from multiple coordinated visualizations in visual analytical systems or use immersive technologies). Third, most interactive physicalizations are produced in an ad hoc, unstructured manner, resulting in one-off solutions tailored to a specific dataset, problem, or interaction. These designs cannot be easily extended to new scenarios or future physicalizations. Systematic toolkits designed to concurrently consider the form and function of a physicalization offer practitioners lower barriers in generating interactive physicalizations while increasing the generalizability of the interaction technique than the de facto standard methods.