Category: Projects

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Revisiting Du Bois

Revisiting Du Bois’ Abolitionist Visualizations

2 rows of 7 visualizations are shown: The top row is made from new data, and the bottom row was made in 1900 by W.E.B. Du Bois

Led by: Andrew Cunningham, Alyx Burns, and Narges Mahyar
Looking to the Past to Visualize the Present: Revisiting W.E.B. Du Bois’ Abolitionist Visualizations
Talk

Amidst growing civil unrest in the United States, we are seeing a new wave of abolitionist thought, which challenges us to look at systems of historic oppression and imagine how we can fundamentally restructure them to bring about an equitable justice. In this poster, we revisit visualizations made in 1900 by sociologist and civil rights activist, W.E.B. Du Bois to help us view the modern state of race in America through a historical abolitionist lens. The juxtaposition of stylistically similar charts made over 100 years apart reveals that while America has made progress toward racial justice in some areas, there is still work to be done. We call upon the visualization community to highlight the experiences of marginalized people and to take part in visualizing data related to the pervasiveness of racism.

If you are interested in working on or learning more about this project, please contact Alyx Burns at alyxanderbur at umass dot edu.

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Collaborative Visual Data Analysis Around Large Interactive Surfaces

Collaborative Visual Data Analysis Around Large Interactive Surfaces

Led by: Narges Mahyar & Ali Sarvghad
Note-taking in co-located collaborative visual analytics: Analysis of an observational study
A Closer Look at Note Taking in the Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics Process
Roles of notes in co-located collaborative visualization

To gain a deeper understanding of collaborative visual data analysis around large interactive surfaces, we designed and carried out an observational user study. Co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics tasks using large interactive wall and tabletop displays. Our findings reinforced the importance of record keeping as an integral activity during collaborative data analysis. In addition, we characterized notes according to their content, scope, and usage, and described how they would fit into the process of collaborative data analysis. We also suggested design guidelines for note-taking functionality for co-located collaborative visual analytics tools.

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CoSpaces

CoSpaces

Led by: Narges Mahyar & Ali Sarvghad
CoSpaces: Workspaces to Support Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics
Observations of Record-Keeping in Co-located Collaborative Analysis
Project Video

CoSpaces is a prototype that is designed for collaborative data analysis on a large interactive tabletop display. It enables multiple users to simultaneously work together and create statistical charts. Some main features include the ability to record and keep track of the work by automatically saving charts, and also an embedded note-taking mechanism. Tabs are used as channels for providing awareness of collaborators’ work status. Each tab provides a portal for viewing work in progress in another workspace without any interruption. Using tabs, an analyst can view a collaborator’s current work, review work history, and study findings.

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CLIP

CLIP (Collaborative Intelligence Pad)

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Supporting Communication and Coordination in Collaborative Sensemaking
Project Video

CLIP is a prototype tool designed and implemented to facilitate collaborative sense-making. The focus of this project is to assist intelligence analysts to record, schematize, and share their findings and hypotheses. Utilizing peer-to-peer communication, all working instances of CLIP broadcast the latest work of an analyst to the rest of the group. Different privacy levels provide controlled sharing. CLIP supports providing awareness of common work by visually indicating common entities.

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UD Co-Spaces

UD Co-Spaces

Led by: Narges Mahyar
UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes
Collaboration Tools To Support Informed Public Engagement
Project Video

UD Co-Spaces (Urban Design Collaborative Spaces) is an integrated multi-display tabletop centered urban design application that was developed and iteratively improved over five years to engage diverse stakeholders such as planners, designers, and the public in the task of generating and testing urban planning and design options. I Investigated the use of novel visualization and collaborative technologies to make data more accessible, understandable, and useful to enhance public engagement in community design and empower them to make well-informed data-driven and evidence-based decisions. Results of an observational study comparing UD Co-Spaces with the traditional paper-based approach indicated that groups using our system had more equity in terms of collaborative contributions and co-creation of plans, more parallel activities through the use of iPad applications, and more fine-grained discussions about features of the design such as look and alignment of buildings because of the 3D view and the real-time metrics.

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ConsensUs

ConsensUs

Led by: Narges Mahyar
ConsensUs: Visualizing Points of Disagreement for Multi-Criteria Collaborative Decision Making

Groups often face difficulty reaching consensus. For complex decisions with multiple latent criteria, discourse alone may impede groups from pinpointing fundamental disagreements. (How) can technology help groups reach better decisions together? To explore this, ConsensUs project explores a visulization approach for multi-criteria group decision making that highlights salient agreements and disagreements between group members.

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CitizenSourcing

CitizenSourcing

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Enabling Crowdsourced Visualizations to Support Large-Scale Civic Engagement

The internet has enabled decision makers in government to collect ideas, suggestions and opinions on civic-related issues. While such strategies typically succeed at collecting opinions from citizens, they often lack follow through in which citizens identify conflicts, empathize with other viewpoints, and collectively generate and act on negotiated solutions. To address these challenges, Citizensourcing project focuses on supporting large-scale civic engagement and extending current civic systems where citizens become “sensors” for reporting and collecting civic-related issues, but also participate in problem-solving processes.

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Design for San Diego (D4SD)

Design for San Diego (D4SD)

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Website

We partnered with leading local organizations to drive collaboration, innovation and impact. In collaboration with City of San Diego, SCALE SD, the Design Forward Alliance, and the National Science Foundation, we launched Design for San Diego (D4SD), an online platform to engage the public in solving San Diego’s mobility challenges. The challenge is open to anyone from students and senior citizens to entrepreneurs and designers. D4SD creates unique opportunities for the public, government, academia, and industry to collaboratively design innovative civic solutions through a mixed engagement approach. Our project goal was to provide an equal voice for everyone to collaborate with other city innovators to solve the most pressing mobility-related issues in San Diego. In addition, during Fall 2010 Narges Mahyar co-taught a course called Civic Design at UCSD, where she taught the human-centered design principles and provided students with guidance and feedback on their D4SD projects.

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Community Crit

CommunityCrit

Led by: Narges Mahyar
CommunityCrit: Inviting the Public to Improve and Evaluate Urban Design Ideas through Micro-Activities, CHI 2018
Website

While urban planning affects the public, most people do not have the time or expertise to participate in the process. CommunityCrit is an online platform that offers “micro-activities” to help community members make meaningful contributions without significant time commitment. In order to lower the barrier for the public, CommunityCrit reduces urban planning documentation into quickly consumable excerpts, and works on a variety of devices. Many online tools solicit public input, yet typically limit interaction to collecting complaints or early-stage ideas. CommunityCrit extends status quo by offering activities that engage community members in elaborating and evaluating urban design ideas, empowers them to contribute, and supports diverse levels of skills and availability.

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Civic Data Deluge

Civic Data Deluge

Led by: Narges Mahyar
The Civic Data Deluge: Understanding the Challenges of Analyzing Large-Scale Community Input

Advancements in digital civics have enabled leaders to engage and gather input from a broader spectrum of the public. However, less is known about the analysis process around community input and the challenges faced by civic leaders as engagement practices scale up. To understand these challenges, we conducted 21 interviews with leaders on civic-oriented projects. We found that at a small-scale, civic leaders manage to facilitate sensemaking through collaborative or individual approaches. However, as civic leaders scale engagement practices to account for more diverse perspectives, making sense of the large quantity of qualitative data becomes a challenge. Civic leaders could benefit from training in qualitative data analysis and simple, scalable collaborative analysis tools that would help the community form a shared understanding. Drawing from these insights, we discuss opportunities for designing tools that could improve civic leaders’ ability to utilize and reflect public input in decisions.