The Physical Life of Data
CfD Conversation 01 | January 28, 2021
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 11, 2021 by Paolo Ciuccarelli
Data visualization is commonly intended — and practiced — as the abstract representation of abstract data. While this double level of abstraction works pretty well at analytical tasks, it inevitably makes the phenomenon behind the data more distant: the reader may forget — or just not be able to see — that behind those abstract visual shapes and numbers lay all sorts of human conditions and social issues.
Transforming data into physical experiences is one of the directions we are exploring at the Center for Design and the College of Arts Media and Design to tackle this inherent abstraction of data and visualization. In the last iteration of the Center’s new “Conversations” series, Dietmar Offenhuber assembled and moderated a panel under the title “ The Physical Life of Data “ to look at the potential of material data practices and embodiment as tools for public engagement and critical inquiry. The cases and projects presented by the speakers show how the physical experience of data and a performative approach can help address large societal challenges such as climate change, migration and disinformation, and how they can foster societal discourses.
The opening case — Hostile Terrain 94 — is a participatory art project in which migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona are represented through 3,000+ hand-written toe-tags physically pinned on a map; the ‘performance’ of locating the deaths takes place simultaneously in different venues, amplifying through time the emotional impact of the physical installation.
Hostile Terrain 94 at the Fisher Center at Bard
A background in marine sciences and alumna of the Information Design and Data Visualization Master program at Northeastern — Skye Morét presented an installation created together with Moritz Stefaner and Liina Klauss in response to the National Geographic and Sky Ocean Ventures Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge: “ Perpetual Plastic “ is a 14m-diameter data-driven installation created in Bali with plastic debris; it represents through a sort of flow diagram the life cycle of plastic products. The scale of the installation and the contextual reference — the plastic debris have been collected from nearby — create a peculiar form of engagement. As in Hostile Terrain 94, the act of building the physical representation becomes part of the installation, making it more a performance and less a sculpture.
Perpetual Plastic, building the installation
“ Embodying Information” is the title of the initiative presented by Rahul Bhargava and Laura Perovich from the Art+Design Department where the research team triangulates information design, dance and (participatory) theater to fight the techno-feticization of data and gather people around it, creating a shared interpretation. Empowering people in speaking the language of data is crucial to enable effective civic participation, and the experiments done by the team at Northeastern prove how performative arts can contribute to data literacy.
“ Imaginaries” is the name of the lab directed by Dan Lockton — last speaker in the Conversation — and a sociological term that refers to the collective social way we make sense of things, like the metaphors we use to make sense of an invisible phenomenon. The case here is about how people make sense of energy consumption and related data, being energy a kind of an invisible thing. The process is particularly interesting, and starts by asking people to draw “how energy looks like” evolving then into stages where new metaphors and concepts are created. Looking at how metaphors are central in the design of data physicalizations, a focus on how we use them and we think and understand through them is much needed.
As often happens, the questions from the audience were as interesting and provoking as the speakers’ presentations, I can’t go through them here but you can watch the video recording of the event. Two of the issues that Offenhuber pointed out in his introduction are particularly relevant in these days: Touch is (still) an underestimated sensory modality, and the pandemic reminded us — especially the ones confined at home alone — how important it might be; Data is more a ‘thing’, like the plastic flip flop in ‘Perpetual Plastic’, and less about abstract numbers, as big data and algorithms and their constructedness remind us. We should keep both these issues in mind, especially when we try to engage a non-expert public, raise awareness and trigger some action.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 11, 2021.
