Data physicalisation

In order to prepare knowledge for communication/knowledge transfer you need to be creative. If you are a knowledge worker it is especially helpful to be creative with your hands. It is relaxing and…

Guest blogger Amy Cesal shares all the ways she used Play-Doh to approach data visualization as a way to participate in The 100 Day Project, a creativity pr ...

We created some huge infographics for the annual report of ablynx, this year we went up 30 metres heigh, used 750 sticks and hundred of metres and dropped 22 ton of black sand on a field. Creative Director: Jim Van Raemdonck, Field Work: Phoebe De Corte, …

For the past six months, designers Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi – who have met each other twice and live 3,500 miles apart – have been getting to know each other through the medium of data…

Commuting to work on public transportation is often very frustrating. It’s unpredictable, I am not in control, and it’s stressful when I could end up being late for work. I can say with certainty…

These physical bar charts, showing the evolution of country indicators over time, were used to conduct the first empirical study showing that physical visualizations can outperform their on-screen counterparts for data retrieval tasks. Sources: Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic and Jean-Daniel Fekete (2013) Evaluating the Efficiency of Physical Visualizations. Related: Also see Yvonne Jansen's PhD dissertation on Physical and Tangible Information Visualization (2014).

This is an unusual viz — for a variety of reasons — so here’s a quick guide to reading it: the two dials represent twelve hours of the day (a.m. and p.m.) with each circle around the dials showing the daily routine of one of the authors in twenty-minute intervals. SNEAK PEEK: Nightingale Magazine, Issue

Nobel prize winning crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin created another physical visualization in the mid 1940's, showing part of the structure of penicillin. An original of this artifact is in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science. This technique recently inspired artist Angela Palmer for her glass portraits. Sources: Lachlan Michael and David Cranswicka (2008) Busting out of crystallography's Sisyphean prison: from pencil and paper to structure solving at the press of a button…

A collection of necklaces and sunglasses visualizes air pollution levels.

A hand-made visualization was done to connect 2385 paragraphs of the German Civil Code by 1896. Every paragraph contains a number of references to other paragraphs. In the physical visualization each reference was visualized through red threads.