Data through Movement: Designing Embodied Human-Data Interaction for Informal Learning

When you picture human-data interactions (HDI), what comes to mind? The datafication of modern life, along with open data initiatives advocating for transparency and access to current and historical datasets, has fundamentally transformed when, where, and how people encounter data. People now rely on data to make decisions, understand current events, and interpret the world. We frequently employ graphs, maps, and other spatialized forms to aid data interpretation, yet the familiarity of these displays causes us to forget that even basic representations are complex, challenging inscriptions and are not neutral; they are based on representational choices that impact how and what they communicate. This book draws on frameworks from the learning sciences, visualization, and human-computer interaction to explore embodied HDI. This exciting sub-field of interaction design is based on the premise that every day we produce and have access to quintillions of bytes of data, the exploration and analysis of which are no longer confined within the walls of research laboratories. This volume examines how humans interact with these data in informal (not work or school) environments, paritcularly in museums.

The first half of the book provides an overview of the multi-disciplinary, theoretical foundations of HDI (in particular, embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied interaction, and embodied learning) and reviews socio-technical theories relevant for designing HDI installations to support informal learning. The second half of the book describes strategies for engaging museum visitors with interactive data visualizations, presents methodologies that can inform the design of hand gestures and body movements for embodied installations, and discusses how HDI can facilitate people's sensemaking about data.

This cross-disciplinary book is intended as a resource for students and early-career researchers in human-computer interaction and the learning sciences, as well as for more senior researchers and museum practitioners who want to quickly familiarize themselves with HDI.

Francesco Cafaro is an assistant professor in the Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His work is deeply multi-disciplinary and investigates how theories from learning, cognitive, and computer sciences can provide the scaffolding for the design of embodied interaction. He has led the design and implementation of interactive data visualizations that have been tested at the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, the New York Hall of Science in Queens, Historic New Harmony in Indiana, and Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC.

Jessica Roberts is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She holds a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences from the University of Illinois-Chicago with a concentration in geospatial analysis and visualization and a B.S. from Northwestern University with a concentration in theatre design. Her research focuses on public engagement with science, with an emphasis on how people learn through, with, and about data in out-of-school environments such as museums and citizen science and how interactive technologies mediate social, informal learning experiences. Her work on the design of interactive learning technologies has won paper awards at CSCL and CHI, and her projects have been exhibited at venues including the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the New York Hall of Science.