VISAP - Making Data Tangible: Materiality, Space, and Public Lifebookmark_border

P.each Peach is a critical and speculative data-driven sculptural installation. Drawing on the immortal peach, a Chinese mythological symbol associated with longevity and immortality, the work uses Google Trends search interest data from 2005 to 2024 related to “immortality” as proxy traces of public attention, mapping them onto temperature and duration parameters for thermal processing. 3D-printed peach forms undergo deformation during heating and are subsequently scanned, reconstructed, and reprinted to form an annual sculptural series, which is further extended into an interactive generative system based on individual conceptions of life. By translating social “heat” into physical heat, the work frames platform-mediated public attention as a material force that shapes the body of the peach. It aims to reveal potential transformations in form and meaning that occur as life is technologically extended and reproduced, while provoking reflection on life preservation, technological desire, and the finitude of death.

The Data Twist is a participatory art project developed with undergraduate and graduate students involving the co-design of an agree-disagree survey, dance games for responding to the survey, and interactive media including a website or choreographic interface, a reimagined Twister board, and wearables for mediating the games. Culminating in a public workshop co-facilitated with the students, The Data Twist ultimately uses survey data and dance games to foster humor, nonverbal debate, and togetherness toward reclaiming public space as a site for open, democratic communication through movement. This paper covers the project’s research motivations spanning the overlapping areas of data embodiment, participatory art, and democratic engagement, as well as the choreographic design process undertaken with the students at the University of Maryland, College Park over a two-year period.

Boston's winter spatial inequality is widely felt, but institutionally invisible. No municipal dataset tracks indoor public space or usage, no planning process accounts for it, and no data infrastructure exists to surface the seasonal inequity it produces. This paper takes that absence as its starting point. By assembling lifestyle guides, crowdsourced maps, entertainment permit records, a variety of municipal inventory datasets, and historical transit maps, we 1) map Boston's de facto indoor public spaces using a typology organized around ownership and consumption expectation, and 2) build a second visualization that makes the scale gap between indoor and outdoor public space immediately legible. From that foundation, we propose the Indoor Emerald Necklace: a conceptual framework for a networked system of indoor public space, modeled on the logic of Olmsted's historic outdoor park system. It is not a plan but a provocation, using the visual language of the map to argue that Boston's winter spatial inequality is not a fact of climate but a designed outcome, and that the boundaries of public care do not have to stop at the entrance.

Established visualization design methodologies structure the design process as a progression through domain characterization, data abstraction, visual encoding, and evaluation. We propose ``Reciprocal Parametric Design'' as a methodology that introduces an explicit iterative exchange between representational modalities into visualization design, where the act of making across modalities is itself analytical. We demonstrate this approach through with Rap Tapestry, a dual-modality visualization project comprising a physical tapestry and a parametric software application, both generated from a shared rule-based logic applied to hip-hop music. The physical tapestry operates at a coarser grain, expressing the embodied experience of a singular song, while the parametric application operates at a finer resolution, enabling analytical comparison of rhyme density, beat structure, and compositional complexity across multiple songs. Through domain expert critique involving hip-hop MCs, a musical cognitive neuroscientist, and a data journalist, we show that this methodology surfaces tacit knowledge that conventional approaches cannot externalize: what rappers call ``the pocket`` becomes visible as spatial pattern, what the neuroscientist studies as ``groove'' is refined and specified to rap, and large-scale compositional structures emerge through cross-song comparison. We name this methodology, propose evaluative criteria for visualization work that integrates material and computational making as co-equal analytical modes, and ground both in domain expert evidence, taking a first step toward defining an approach that is often practiced across visualization and design but not yet formalized.

In 1980, urbanist William H. Whyte filmed pedestrians in four American public spaces and, by hand, frame by frame, mapped how people gathered, lingered, and moved. His central finding was elegantly simple: what attracts people most, it would appear, is other people. Thirty years later, researchers returned to the same sites and compared this archival footage to newly filmed contemporary footage, this time analyzed with computer vision, and found that public space had quietly changed: pedestrians now walk 15% faster, lingering has been cut in half, and while people still walk alone at the same rate as before, they encounter each other in groups far less often. Street Scores takes this finding, and the decades of observation and footage behind it, and asks what form is adequate to carry it, not a chart, but a score. Individuals become rectangles, groups become segments, and the resulting composition was translated first into an interactive visualization, then, as one exploratory step, into a live musical and choreographic performance staged in a public plaza. This paper reflects on that translation, examining what a score makes newly available relative to more conventional representations, and what is gained and lost in the process, and arguing that the choice of form is not neutral but itself an argument about what data means. We treat the live performance as a first experiment in an open, ongoing inquiry into which forms can honor what public space still owes the people who pass through it. More broadly, we frame this translation, from science to concept to object and back into new questions, as one instance of a recurring art-science methodology.