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The rapid rise in technologies for data collection has created an unmatched opportunity to advance the use of data-rich tools for lifecycle decision-making. However, the usefulness of these technologies is limited by the ability to translate lifecycle data into actionable insights for human decision-makers. This is especially true in the case of sustainable lifecycle design (SLD), as the assessment of environmental impacts, and the feasibility of making corresponding design changes, often relies on human expertise and intuition. Supporting human sense-making in SLD requires the use of both data-driven and user-driven methods while exploring lifecycle data. A promising approach for combining the two is through the use of visual analytics (VA) tools. Such tools can leverage the ability of computer-based tools to gather, process, and summarize data along with the ability of human-experts to guide analyses through domain knowledge or data-driven insight. In this paper, we review previous research that has created VA tools in SLD. We also highlight existing challenges and future opportunities for such tools in different lifecycle stages—design, manufacturing, distribution & supply chain, use-phase, end-of-life, as well as life cycle assessment. Our review shows that while the number of VA tools in SLD is relatively small, researchers are increasingly focusing on the subject matter. Our review also suggests that VA tools can address existing challenges in SLD and that significant future opportunities exist.

Engineering graduates in advancing economies are not only expected to have engineering knowledge, but also use them in creative and innovative ways. The importance of visual thinking has been critical for creativity and innovation in design. However, today’s engineering students are proficient in detailed design tools but lacking in conceptual design and ideation, and engineering curricula needs to develop a more effective framework for teaching visual thinking. In this paper, we report our efforts to embed principles of design thinking and visual thinking practices, like McKim’s “seeing, imagining and drawing” cycle [1]. We use a toy design course in mechanical engineering for our pilot study as a scaffold for introducing these principles in an engaging, creative, and fun environment. We introduced free-hand sketching as a tool for visual thinking during the design and communication of concepts. We also report the impact of these changes through information gleaned from student feedback surveys and analysis of design notebooks. We use our findings to propose ways to provide the students with a set of balanced techniques that help them in visual thinking, communication, and design. An improved implementation of this experience is discussed and future work is proposed to overcome barriers to thinking and communication.

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Current text visualization techniques typically provide overviews of document content and structure using intrinsic properties such as term frequencies, co-occurrences, and sentence structures. Such visualizations lack conceptual overviews incorporating domainrelevant knowledge, needed when examining documents such as research articles or technical reports. To address this shortcoming, we present ConceptScope, a technique that utilizes a domain ontology to represent the conceptual relationships in a document in the form of a Bubble Treemap visualization. Multiple coordinated views of document structure and concept hierarchy with text overviews further aid document analysis. ConceptScope facilitates exploration and comparison of single and multiple documents respectively. We demonstrate ConceptScope by visualizing research articles and transcripts of technical presentations in computer science. In a comparative study with DocuBurst, a popular document visualization tool, ConceptScope was found to be more informative in exploring and comparing domain-specifc documents, but less so when it came to documents that spanned multiple disciplines. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Information visualization.

We present an argument for using visual analytics to aid Grounded Theory methodologies in qualitative data analysis. Grounded theory methods involve the inductive analysis of data to generate novel insights and theoretical constructs. Making sense of unstructured text data is uniquely suited for visual analytics. Using natural language processing techniques such as parts‐of‐speech tagging, retrieving information content, and topic modeling, different parts of the data can be structured and semantically associated, and interactively explored, thereby providing conceptual depth to the guided discovery process. We review grounded theory methods and identify processes that can be enhanced through visual analytic techniques. Next, we develop an interface for qualitative text analysis, and evaluate our design with qualitative research practitioners who analyze texts with and without visual analytics support. The results of our study suggest how visual analytics can be incorporated into qualitative data analysis tools, and the analytic and interpretive benefits that can result.

Visual data storytelling is gaining importance as a means of presenting data-driven information or analysis results, especially to the general public. This has resulted in design principles being proposed for data-driven storytelling, and new authoring tools being created to aid such storytelling. However, data analysts typically lack sufficient background in design and storytelling to make effective use of these principles and authoring tools. To assist this process, we present ChartStory for crafting data stories from a collection of user-created charts, using a style akin to comic panels to imply the underlying sequence and logic of data-driven narratives. Our approach is to operationalize established design principles into an advanced pipeline which characterizes charts by their properties and similarity, and recommends ways to partition, layout, and caption story pieces to serve a narrative. ChartStory also augments this pipeline with intuitive user interactions for visual refinement of generated data comics. We extensively and holistically evaluate ChartStory via a trio of studies. We first assess how the tool supports data comic creation in comparison to a manual baseline tool. Data comics from this study are subsequently compared and evaluated to ChartStory's automated recommendations by a team of narrative visualization practitioners. This is followed by a pair of interview studies with data scientists using their own datasets and charts who provide an additional assessment of the system. We find that ChartStory provides cogent recommendations for narrative generation, resulting in data comics that compare favorably to manually-created ones.

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