Beyond physical bar charts: an exploration of designing physical visualizations

Physical visualizations only recently started to attract attention from the InfoVis and HCI communities. They are well known to encourage playful exploration and to stimulate curiosity, but are also considered to support analytical information visualization tasks. However, creating effective and usable physical visualizations has not been explored in much detail. In this work, we present our early approaches and experiences in designing and building novel physical visualizations. We started with sketches on paper, created first low fidelity prototypes out of cardboard and built the final visualizations with thread, acrylic glass and a laser cutter. An initial user study was conducted to investigate if basic information retrieval tasks can be accomplished with our physical visualizations and how users interact with them.