Workshop Abstract

Constructive visualizations and 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 mechanism, notably easier perception, hands-on manipulation and enhanced interaction with other participants. We can distinguish four types of physical visualizations according to two dimensions: active/passive and whole/kit. In this workshop we will focus on two kinds of visualizations, construction kits and (passive) whole visualizations. 

(1) Construction kits allow building and manipulating visualisations from building blocks. In education, construction kits are also known as expressive media or manipulatives and allow interactive exploration of concepts, designs 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 that has new functionality (i.e. visualizations in our case) according to some rules. (2) Whole visualizations are created digitally and then rendered entirely by a 3D printer or other fabrication device. Typically these are used to present 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 either teacher or learner-centric. We then introduce some technical principles of digital design and fabrication and discuss the practical requirements for teachers and/or students to learn and use digital design and fabrication technology. We will finally will engage participants in some proto-typing activity.