Physicalizing Touch Behavior

by admin | Mar 11, 2025

Physicalizing Touch Behavior

How do people “think” with their hands, as they explore unfamiliar objects? How do they integrate vision, touch, and prior knowledge?

In this interdisciplinary collaboration between designers and cognitive psychologists, we explore and visualize how people touch objects as they examine and try to gain information from them.

We introduced a novel technique for mapping traces of touch, using an analog UV tracer substance, leaving touch traces that provide clues about haptic cognition.

with Laura Perovich and Bernice Rogowitz. 2021 – 2025

Results and Publications:

Offenhuber, Dietmar, Laura J Perovich, and Bernice Rogowitz. 2025. “Data at Hand – Exploring the Tactile Perception of Data Physicalizations.” In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Osaka, JP: ACM. [download pdf]

In this data physicalization study, we examined whether different mapping choices — how data is expressed as physical form — influence the way people touch these data representations as they try to interpret their meaning.

Perovich, Laura, Bernice Rogowitz, Victoria Crabb, Jack Vogelsang, Sara Hartleben, and Dietmar Offenhuber. “The Tactile Dimension: A Method for Physicalizing Touch Behaviors.” Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023.
Honorable Mention CHI 2023, [Video] [download pdf]

In this more formal series of experiments, we show that the way people touch objects depend on the narrative framing of the task – similar to Yarbus’ classic eyetracking experiment.

Rogowitz, Bernice, Laura J. Perovich, Yuke Li, Bjorn Kierulf, and Dietmar Offenhuber. “Touching Art — A Method for Visualizing Tactile Experience.” Alt-VIS, 2021. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2110.00686. [download pdf]

An exploratory study generating touch traces on various objects and evaluating their correlation with touch behavior.

Autographic Design – the Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World

by admin | Oct 1, 2023

Autographic Design – the Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World

Book companion website autographic.design

An ambitious vision for design based on the premise that data is material, not abstract.

New Monograph published at MIT Press

Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today’s society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design.

Autographic refers to the notion that every event inscribes itself in countless ways. Think of a sundial, for example—a perfectly autographic device that displays information on itself. Inspired by such post-digital practices of visualization and evidence construction, Offenhuber describes an approach to visualization based on the premise that data is a material entity rather than an abstract representation. Emerson wrote, “Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face.” In Autographic Design, Offenhuber introduces a model for design that emphasizes traces, imprints, and self-inscriptions, turning them into sensory displays.

In an age where misinformation is harder and harder to identify, Autographic Design makes an urgent and persuasive case for a different approach that calls attention to the production of data and its connection to the material world. (MIT Press)

Praise

“A suggestive addition to the literature on data and materiality, Offenhuber’s work on the ‘self-inscribing autographic trace’ should quickly become a standard reference in the fields of computational analysis and design.”

Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, UCLA; author of Inventing the Alphabet

“Offenhuber shows how autographic design operations and techniques can offer a refreshing new way to trace data culture without forgetting software. This is one of the most important recent books in design and critical data studies.”

Jussi Parikka, Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University; author of Operational Images

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547024/autographic-design/
https://www.amazon.com/Autographic-Design-Self-Inscribing-metaLAB-Projects/dp/0262547023/

Reconsidering Representation

by dietoff | Jun 9, 2023

Reconsidering Representation

In 2022/2023 I co-led the workgroup “representational strategies” together with Joy Mountford under the “Future of Design Education” initiative led by Don Norman and Meredith Davis.

The journal article “Reconsidering Representation in College Design Curricula” published in She Ji journal (Open Access) summarizes our thoughts on the challenges and issues connected to representation.

We also summarized our recommendations in a 12 big ideas about representation document.

What we talk about when we talk about data physicality

by admin | Sep 19, 2020

What we talk about when we talk about data physicality

Best Paper Award IEEE CG&A

For the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications journal special issue on data physicalization, I wrote a paper on data materiality, especially focused on which concepts of data are mobilized in the data physicalization discourse and practice.

Data physicalizations “map data to physical form,” yet many canonical examples are not based on data sets. To address this contradiction, I argue that the practice of physicalization forces us to rethink traditional notions of data. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to examine how physicalizations relate to data. This paper develops a two-dimensional conceptual space for comparing different perspectives on data used in physicalization, drawing from design theory and critical data studies literature. One axis distinguishes between epistemological and ontological perspectives, focusing on the relationship between data and the mind. The second axis distinguishes how data relate to the world, differentiating between representational and relational perspectives. To clarify the aesthetic and conceptual implications of these different perspectives, the paper discusses examples of data physicalization for each quadrant of the continuous space. It further uses the framework to examine the explicit and implicit assumptions about data in physicalization literature. As a theoretical paper, it encourages practitioners to think about how data relate to the manifestations and the phenomena they try to capture. It invites exploration of the relationship between data and the world as a generative source of creative tension.

The paper can currently be accessed as a pre-print on the arxiv server

The Inscriptome: virus as a visual instrument

by admin | Sep 19, 2020

The Inscriptome: virus as a visual instrument

In this piece for the (now defunct) Strelka Magazine, Orkan Telhan and I looked at the cultural and historical context of viruses and their vaccines as media of inscription. Based on the model of 19th century arm-to-arm vaccination, we look at how the governance of viral inscriptions is a delicate balancing act.

The virus inscribes itself onto the body, but how does it inscribe itself onto the city and the world at large? A new inscription system based on material proxies, bioindicators, and metagenomic signatures allows us to see viruses as recording agents and better understand which spaces they conquer, which species they traverse, and what can stop them.

Link to the archived text

Image: Color plate by Francisco Javier de Balmis shows smallpox vaccination scars. Courtesy of Welcome Library