Perception! Immersion! Empowerment! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization

We explore how the lens of fictional superpowers can help characterize how visualizations empower people and provide inspiration for new visualization systems. Researchers and practitioners often tout visualizations' ability to “make the invisible visible” and to “enhance cognitive abilities.”...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 22 - 32
Main Authors: Willett, Wesley, Aseniero, Bon Adriel, Carpendale, Sheelagh, Dragicevic, Pierre, Jansen, Yvonne, Oehlberg, Lora, Isenberg, Petra
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States IEEE 01.01.2022
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Subjects:
Cognition
Comics
Computer Graphics
Computer Science
Data visualization
Empowerment
fiction
Human-Computer Interaction
Humans
Immersion
Inspiration
Interactive systems
Pattern recognition
Perception
Pragmatics
situated visualization
superpowers
vision
Visualization
Situated visualization
Visualization
superpowers
Vision
Perception
Cognition
Fiction
Empowerment
ISSN:1077-2626, 1941-0506, 1941-0506
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We explore how the lens of fictional superpowers can help characterize how visualizations empower people and provide inspiration for new visualization systems. Researchers and practitioners often tout visualizations' ability to “make the invisible visible” and to “enhance cognitive abilities.” Meanwhile superhero comics and other modern fiction often depict characters with similarly fantastic abilities that allow them to see and interpret the world in ways that transcend traditional human perception. We investigate the intersection of these domains, and show how the language of superpowers can be used to characterize existing visualization systems and suggest opportunities for new and empowering ones. We introduce two frameworks: The first characterizes seven underlying mechanisms that form the basis for a variety of visual superpowers portrayed in fiction. The second identifies seven ways in which visualization tools and interfaces can instill a sense of empowerment in the people who use them. Building on these observations, we illustrate a diverse set of “visualization superpowers” and highlight opportunities for the visualization community to create new systems and interactions that empower new experiences with data Material and illustrations are available under CC-BY 4.0 at osf.io/8yhfz.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114844