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While information is a crucial part of people's everyday lives, many people find that access to information via today's technologies is awkward, stressful, and overly intrusive in their lives. The problem is not with the information itself, but rather with its volume and the unwieldy ways currently provided for interacting with digital content. My research focus is to create interactive information visualizations so that they support people's everyday work and social practices as they interact with information. In this paper I will provide an eclectic overview of my research, particularly featuring the research done by my PhD students.Keywords: information visualization, observational studies. Index Terms: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]:User Interfaces -Interaction styles, Input devices and strategies. INTRODUCTIONI am amazed and deeply honoured to receive the Canadian Human-Computer Communication Society award. This is definitely a paper of thanks, and I have many people to thank -so many that it will not be possible to name them all here. For example, while academia is reportedly quite competitive, my experience has been that they have been welcoming and supportive. This has particularly included my home department, Computer Science at the University of Calgary, and the three nationwide research collectives I have been privileged to be a part of: NECTAR, GRAND, and Surfnet. It is also true of wonderful support and research exchange with SMART Technologiesparticularly Gerald Morrison, David Martin and Nancy Knowlton. However, even though these have been tremendously important, I would like to make this brief paper a celebration of those to whom I owe the most -my students.In the next section I will outline the research I have conducted with my research group -Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis). I will keep the words brief, and the images as plentiful as possible. In a paper of this length, I cannot possibly cover all the research we have conducted, nor mention all of my students. I have had to choose and have made eclectic selection. I have chosen some projects because they show our beginnings and others because they are more recent. Some projects were chosen because they represent what InnoVis is known for and others were chosen because they are less well known. Within this selection there is at least one project of all graduated PhD students. The students involved are featured with images and are named in captions. Post-doctoral fellows will be identified with PD and collaborators who are not my students will simply be listed as collaborators. INNOVIS RESEARCHMy research goal has always been to make information more accessible, more comprehensible, and more possible to make use of in our everyday lives. To this end, my research has encompassed new visual representations, and new explorations into interaction techniques. However, all of this has been grounded in careful, ethnographically-inspired observational studies. Since these studies have in many ways provided the foundations f...

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Self-reflection is a central goal of personal informatics systems, and constructing visualizations from physical tokens has been found to help people reflect on data. However, so far, constructive physicalization has only been studied in lab environments with provided datasets. Our qualitative study investigates the construction of personal physicalizations in people's domestic environments over 2-4 weeks. It contributes an understanding of (1) the process of creating personal physicalizations, (2) the types of personal insights facilitated, (3) the integration of selfreflection in the physicalization process, and (4) its benefits and challenges for self-reflection. We found that in constructive personal physicalization, data collection, construction and self-reflections are deeply intertwined. This extends previous models of visualization creation and data-driven self-reflection. We outline how benefits such as reflection through manual construction, personalization, and presence in everyday life can be transferred to a wider set of digital and physical systems.

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that advance all disciplines involved. In this paper we introduce and define a new methodological paradigm we call design by immersion, which provides an alternative perspective on problem-driven visualization work. Design by immersion embeds transdisciplinary experiences at the center of the visualization process by having visualization researchers participate in the work of the target domain (or domain experts participate in visualization research). Based on our own combined experiences of working on cross-disciplinary, problemdriven visualization projects, we present six case studies that expose the opportunities that design by immersion enables, including (1) exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces, (2) enriching domain understanding through personal experiences, and (3) building strong transdisciplinary relationships. Furthermore, we illustrate how the process of design by immersion opens up a diverse set of design activities that can be combined in different ways depending on the type of collaboration, project, and goals. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential pitfalls of design by immersion.

In this paper we discuss the creation of visual mementos as a new application area for visualization. We define visual mementos as visualizations of personally relevant data for the purpose of reminiscing, and sharing of life experiences. Today more people collect digital information about their life than ever before. The shift from physical to digital archives poses new challenges and opportunities for self-reflection and self-representation. Drawing on research on autobiographical memory and on the role of artifacts in reminiscing, we identified design challenges for visual mementos: mapping data to evoke familiarity, expressing subjectivity, and obscuring sensitive details for sharing. Visual mementos can make use of the known strengths of visualization in revealing patterns to show the familiar instead of the unexpected, and extend representational mappings beyond the objective to include the more subjective. To understand whether people's subjective views on their past can be reflected in a visual representation, we developed, deployed and studied a technology probe that exemplifies our concept of visual mementos. Our results show how reminiscing has been supported and reveal promising new directions for self-reflection and sharing through visual mementos of personal experiences.

We introduce Visual Sedimentation, a novel design metaphor for visualizing data streams directly inspired by the physical process of sedimentation. Visualizing data streams (e. g., Tweets, RSS, Emails) is challenging as incoming data arrive at unpredictable rates and have to remain readable. For data streams, clearly expressing chronological order while avoiding clutter, and keeping aging data visible, are important. The metaphor is drawn from the real-world sedimentation processes: objects fall due to gravity, and aggregate into strata over time. Inspired by this metaphor, data is visually depicted as falling objects using a force model to land on a surface, aggregating into strata over time. In this paper, we discuss how this metaphor addresses the specific challenge of smoothing the transition between incoming and aging data. We describe the metaphor's design space, a toolkit developed to facilitate its implementation, and example applications to a range of case studies. We then explore the generative capabilities of the design space through our toolkit. We finally illustrate creative extensions of the metaphor when applied to real streams of data.

Providing tools that make visualization authoring accessible to visualization non-experts is a major research challenge. Currently the most common approach to generating a visualization is to use software that quickly and automatically produces visualizations based on templates. However, it has recently been suggested that constructing a visualization with tangible tiles may be a more accessible method, especially for people without visualization expertise. There is still much to be learned about the differences between these two visualization authoring practices. To better understand how people author visualizations in these two conditions, we ran a qualitative study comparing the use of software to the use of tangible tiles, for the creation of bar charts. Close observation of authoring activities showed how each of the following varied according to the tool used: 1) sequences of action; 2) distribution of time spent on different aspects of the InfoVis pipeline; 3) pipeline task separation; and 4) freedom to manipulate visual variables. From these observations, we discuss the implications of the variations in activity sequences, noting tool design considerations and pointing to future research questions.