FlexPhys: A Workshop Cookbook for Operationalizing Data Physicalization Research Questions

Keywords

data physicalization, methods, workshops

Abstract

We introduce FlexPhys, a cookbook that researchers can use to operationalize data physicalization research questions through workshop design. While guidelines exist for running workshops in educational contexts, designing a data physicalization workshop when the goal is to answer research questions is an ad-hoc process for which little guidance exists, but for which many choices must be made (e.g., in terms of materials, tools, and data). We draw from our experience designing data physicalization workshops and from reviewing three existing workshops, to distill the cookbook's core ingredient (context and goal) and eight additional ingredients related to making (material, tool, technique), data encoding (data type, variable, mark/unit), and interactivity (interaction, sensory modality). We then show how FlexPhys can be used to describe and compare physicalization workshops, and to generate workshops that address specific data physicalization research questions.