Figure 1. The 6 exemplar physicalizations (Phys1-Phys6) and a depiction of the experiment setup. The physicalizations were presented to participants from 4 different orientations according to the vertices of the plane. Participants completed 3 tasks including clustering, filtering and finding the extremum in the abstract 'data'.

Figure 1: A digital render of one of the exemplar physicalizations (phys1, right), colors depict identified clusters by the participant. Various reconfiguration strategies were observed, including the increase of cohesion within clusters (left) and the increase of separation between clusters (middle).

We investigated how a physical artifact could support seamless interaction with personal activity data in everyday life. We introduce LOOP (Figure 1), a physical artifact that changes its shape according to the activity data of the owner, providing an abstract visualization. This paper reports on the design process of LOOP that was informed by interviews and co-creation sessions with end users. We conclude with future work on the evaluation of the concept. This paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, LOOP is proposed as an example of an alternative approach to physically represent activity data. Secondly, the design process and rationale behind LOOP are presented as design knowledge.

The standard definition for “physicalizations” is “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data”  [ 47 ]. While this working definition provides the fundamental groundwork for conceptualizing physicalization, in practice many physicalization systems go beyond the scope of this definition as they consist of distributed physical and digital elements that involve complex interaction mechanisms. In this article, we examine how “physicalization” is part of a broader ecology—the “physecology”—with properties that go beyond the scope of the working definition. Through analyzing 60 representative physicalization papers, we derived six design dimensions of a physecology: (i) represented data type, (ii) way of information communication, (iii) interaction mechanisms, (iv) spatial input–output coupling, (v) physical setup, and (vi) audiences involved. Our contribution is the extension of the definition of physicalization to the broader concept of “physecology,” to provide conceptual clarity on the design of physicalizations for future work.

The traditional activity tracking system (1) providing step data to LOOP (2) and over time showing the number of steps made on each day of the week (3).