Workshop Abstract

Constructive visualizations, digital design and fabrication

Daniel K. Schneider, TECFA, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva

Physical visualisations (or physicalizations) can promote cognition through a variety of mechanisms, notably easier perception, hands-on manipulation and enhanced interaction with other participants. We can distinguish several types of physical visualizations, according to three dimensions: active/passive, kit/whole, digitally enhanced/non digital. In this workshop we will focus on two kinds of visualizations, non-digital construction kits and whole visualizations. 

(1) Construction kits allow creating and manipulating visualisations from building blocks. In education, construction kits, also known as expressive media or manipulatives, allow interactive exploration of designs, concepts and roles. Physical visualizations can for example represent tabular quantitative data or more qualitative data like the state of a project or a system. Construction kits to create such visualization include a set of tokens that can be assembled into something with a new functionality (i.e. visualizations in our case) according to predefined rules. (2) Whole visualizations are created digitally and then rendered entirely by a 3D printer or other fabrication device. Typically, these 3D visualizations are represent quantiative data, e.g. comparative time series, maps or functions with 3 variables.

In this workshop we first will present the concepts of physical visulisation and construction kit and discuss a few examples that are either teacher or learner-centric. Then we will introduce some technical principles of digital design and fabrication, before discussing the practical requirements for teachers and/or students to learn and use digital design and fabrication technology. Finally, we will engage participants in some proto-typing activity.