Touching Data
with Dietmar Offenhuber, Bernice Rogowitz, and Northeastern students Sara Hartleben, Jack Vogelsang, Victoria Crabb, Yuke Li, and Bjorn Kierulf
This project explores methods for capturing, displaying, and understanding the ways in which people touch objects. Documenting touch can provide important information on how people engage with artefacts, particularly in the case of data physicalization where physical interaction is thought to be important, but is not yet well understood. Our work explores low-cost material methods for tracking touch through tracers. We explore how touch behaviors vary between people, artefacts, and motivation, among other parameters.
Embodied experiences—of data, technology, and the environment—may facilitate social and emotional engagement with information or challenges. This work supports larger efforts to explore multisensory and immersive storytelling around environmental issues by beginning to reveal the ways that tactile experiences support people in making sense of information.
- Perovich, L.J., B. Rogowitz, V. Crabb, J. Vogelsang, S. Hartleben, D. Offenhuber. The Tactile Dimension: a Method for Physicalizing Touch Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 842, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581137.
- Rogowitz, B., L.J. Perovich, Y. Li, B. Kierulf, D. Offenhuber. Touching Art - A Method for Visualizing Tactile Experience. alt.VIS workshop co-located with IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), October 2021.
