“Making With Data”: Interview with co-author, associate professor of design & information, Samuel Huron

Dr. Samuel Huron is an information designer and associate professor in the Design of information technologies inside the Social and Economic Science department of Télécom Paris at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris and part of the CNRS Institut Interdisciplinaire de l’Innovation. He leads the design studio telecom Paris tech at Telecom Paris and he is part of the co-design Lab, Interact team and Diva HCI team. Since 2018, he is working with international fellow researchers, designers and artists on the book “Making With Data, Physical Design and Craft in a Data-Drive-World”, published in December 2022.

Thank you Samuel for taking this time to tell us more about the “Making with data” book that got out in December 2022 after four years of work. To start, could you tell us more about how this book came to be and how you did meet with the co-authors?

The first idea emerged from the Dagsthul  Back School data physicalization seminar that occurred in 2018 in Germany and brought together researchers and designers for a full week [the full report of this event is available online]. The event was organized by the researches Yvonne Jansen, Jason Alexander, Petra Isenberg, Bernice E. Rogowitz, Andrew Vande Moere. Yvonne Jansen and Pierre Dragicevic are the founders of the dataphys.org website, are also behind the wiki of dataphyz and are pioneers of dataphysicalization research. Along with the other co-authors of the book Till Nagel, Lora Oehlberg and Wesley Willett, and more generally during the seminar, we approached the question of our field of research structuration. What are the main problems and challenges raised in the field of dataphysicalization research? Which area of the field needs to be further investigated?

I joined one small group of researchers willing to address the question of “how do people make dataphysicalizations?”, as the designing and making processes are usually not very documented compared to other dimensions. From there emerged the idea to make a book that would highlight the different making processes from concrete examples of dataphysicalizations, while remaining accessible for a non-academic audience.

Co-authors of the "Making with data" book are:

Samuel Huron is Associate Professor of Design and Information Communication Technology at Co-design lab, Telecom Paris-Tech. His research addresses how humans create visual and physical representations of abstract information to think, collaborate, learn, analyse, explore, and design new data representations, systems and information artefacts.

Till Nagel is a Carl Zeiss Foundation Endowed Professor of Visual Analytics at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences. His research interests are in the fields of information visualization, interaction design and data literacy.

Lora Oehlberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. Her research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on interactive tools and technologies that support creativity, innovation, and multi-disciplinary collaboration in domains such as interaction design, maker communities, sustainable product design and health care.

Wesley Willett is a computer scientist specializing in information visualization, social computing, new media, and human computer interaction. He currently is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Visual Analytics at the University of Calgary where he leads the Data Experience Lab.

During the seminar, we used a card game made by Anaëlle Beignon called “You name it”. This card game was a printed stack of all the dataphysicalizations from the dataphyz wiki. Our purpose was to conduct a workshop to have participants classify those dataphysicalizations and then come up with a list of categories and criteria for a “dataphyz” typology.

We ended up with five categories of dataphysicalizations which became the five sections of the book:

1. Craft dataphysicalizations: in this category, creators work directly with matter itself to craft and object. This usually requires some crafting skills. This is for example the work of Adrien Segal (furniture designer), Sarah Hayes (working with origami), Mika West (working with fabrics), Loren Madsen (metal and wood).

2. Participative dataphysicalizations:  here the creator invents a participatory device or process that invite people (usually in public spaces) to contribute by moving some physical tokens (adding to a pile, displacing tokens). Here we find the work of Pauline Gourlet (CAIRN) for instance.

3. Digital Production: Here creators use digital tools (such as CNC machines) to craft their work. This usually requires a design phase on the computer, followed by a making phase through the machine and an assembly phase.

4. Actuation: Here the whole dataphysicalization is made by the action of a robot or an automate moving pieces of materials to form a pattern or express a change in the data represented.

5. Environment: This category refers to dataphysicalizations made visible through environmental physical actions, such as wood burned by the sun or pattern revealed (or erased) by moving tides. Those rely on external forces to be made visible.

That is a very interesting way to approach the many practices of dataphysicalization. How did you then decide which pieces were going to be featured in the book?

We had the chance to interview some creators during the seminar in 2018, like Adrien Segal, about how they wanted their work to be described. We wanted to focus on the studio work, the different steps of their making processes and how going through it changed their vision of the initial data or topic.

We sent a questionnaire to many creators and then selected (over the course of four years, so it was quite a process!) five projects per section of the book, mainly based on the available material documenting the creative process: blueprints, schemes, plans, drawings, mockups, etc. as we really wanted the book to be about the making process. We got curious about which tools, matters, software and methodology each creator used.

Could you take us through the description of one specific project for instance?

Sure, let’s take the work of Loren Madsen who is a datasculpture pioneer as he started in the 1990s to make data-shaped sculptures about socio-economic data, followed by many more pieces.
“Endings” is a piece representing statistical trends that focus on the positive side of things such as the end of diseases or specific pollutions in the last decades. As our world news headlines tend to focus on negative statistical trends, Loren Madsen wanted to showcase a different side of things and highlight positive evolutions.

The subject of Endings is “happy
endings”—like the end of smallpox or
airborne lead pollution. Each tubular
piece is an abstraction of a graph
representing a generally desirable ending:
polio has been nearly eliminated; wars—
counterintuitively—are less frequent, less
deadly, and far less expensive since the
end of the Cold War. The sculpture is, in
short, a random catalog of good news
should a viewer be interested.
Each tube has a small number stamped in
its end, and a printed guide shows both
the original graph and a representation
of its sculptural abstraction, as well as
dimensions and sources.

“Making with Data”, Handcraft Chapter, p. 88.

Loren Madsen chose to work with copper pipes and had to get himself a specific tool to bend the pipes to the desired shapes. We asked him to take pictures of this tool and to share the drawings of his creative process so we could give a sense, to our readers, of his workshop process. If I had to sum up the steps he took:

• He collected several datasets to work from
  • he came up with the idea of working with copper pipes (a material-based approach)
  • He plotted the data in Excel, then imported them into a CAD software
  • He printed blueprints at scale and then bent the pipes himself to match the curves he drew.
    He gave us a great example of a process that does not start with the idea of the finished object but instead starts from the data and moves forward through assembly of the pieces.

Thanks a lot, Samuel Huron, this gives us already a good sense of what to expect from the book. Could you tell us a word about the cover of the book, which is a dataphysicalization as well?

Yes, we wanted to play around with the design and make a well-crafted object. The paper waves of the piece reflect the undulating word counts of each of the book’s 24 chapters. To create the piece, we (the book’s editors) compiled the data and created vector graphics files for each paper layer. We then commissioned a paper artist, Betty Soliman, to select paper colours, cut each layer, and assemble them together. Graphic designer Elodie Maigné then composited photographs of the piece to create the final cover. The resulting visualization embodies the vision of the book — representing its contents as an evocative data object and bringing the idea of making with data full circle.

That is pretty amazing! I look forward to receiving my own copy of the book. Thank you for sharing those insights with us Samuel, and I wish the best to the “Making with data” book’s future!

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Sources

The book’s website: https://makingwithdata.org/

The Twitter account for “Making with Data”: https://mobile.twitter.com/makingwithdata

The “You name it” card game by Anaelle Beignon: https://anaellebeignon.fr/you-name-it.html

The full report on the 2018 Dataphysicalization seminar: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10351/pdf/dagrep_v008_i010_p127_18441.pdf

The wiki of dataphysicalizations: http://dataphys.org/list/

The website of Loren Madsen: http://www.lorenmadsen.com/data_art.html

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