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Creative arts and service design

Effects of curves on network visualization

Node-link diagrams have been used to visualize abstract graph data for the purpose of knowledge discovery and knowledge sharing. Although links are often drawn as straight lines, curves has also been used in drawing graphs. Further, despite the wide use of curves for various purposes, the research on to what extent these curves serve their purposes or how effective curves help visualizations covey the embedded information to users is still a topic that requires further exploration.

In an attempt to answer this question, we initiated a project that aims to systematically investigate the pros and cons of curves, and their impact on human graph comprehension in terms of task performance and task execution behaviour.


Use of ambient and eco-visualization for promotion of environmental awareness

Eco-visualizations (EVs) are any kind of interactive devices or pictures made by media artists that are targeted at revealing energy use in order to promote sustainable behaviours or foster positive attitudes towards sustainable practices. Despite much effort in developing various kinds of EVs, their values are mainly appreciated from the artistic perspective. Relatively less attention has been paid to investigating whether and how they fulfil their purposes.

The proposed objectives of the project was to explore this space by 1) designing three different EVs, and 2) examining how these EVs mediate their effect on human energy consumption behaviour.


Making sense of biology data through artistic interactions

Increasingly larger and more complex data about people’s health and biology are being generated than ever before. Interactive visualization that takes advantage of powerful human visual perception system, combined with advances in IT and data science offers significant opportunities to generate new knowledge and improve medical practice. However, despite many innovative visualization techniques and appealing pictures have been proposed in the literature, only a few of them have been used in practice. It is widely acknowledged that this is mainly due to the lack of mechanism in them that motivates users to engage with the process of sense-making.

To improve the situation, this project draws on latest research results from the fields of visual arts, visualization, health and education and aims to design and evaluate artistic interaction methods. We define artistic interaction for the first time as a series of dynamic artistic visual representations of data for effectively communicating the transformation of data statuses. It is hypothesized that by introducing artistic interactions, users will be more engaged with the sense-making process, thus making the visualization more effective in conveying the embedded information to the end users, in comparison with traditional reality based interactions.