Lyn Bartram

• Ph.d.
• Professor (Associate) at Simon Fraser University

Data is moving beyond the scientific community, flooding communication channels and addressing issues of importance to all aspects of daily life. This highlights the need for rich and expressive data representations to communicate the science on which society rests and on which society must act. However, current visualiza-tion techniques often lack...

Ambiguity is pervasive in the complex sensemaking domains of risk assessment and prediction but there remains little research on how to design visual analytics tools to accommodate it. We report on findings from a qualitative study based on a conceptual framework of sensemaking processes to investigate how both new visual analytics designs and exis...

We report a study investigating the viability of using interactive visualizations to aid architectural design with building codes. While visualizations have been used to support general architectural design exploration, existing computational solutions treat building codes as separate from, rather than part of, the design process, creating challeng...

Ambiguity is pervasive in the complex sensemaking domains of risk assessment and prediction but there remains little research on how to design visual analytics tools to accommodate it. We report on findings from a qualitative study based on a conceptual framework of sensemaking processes to investigate how both new visual analytics designs and exis...

Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects...

Ambiguity, the state in which alternative interpretations are plausible or even desirable, is an inexorable part of complex sensemaking. Its challenges are compounded when analysis involves risk, is constrained , and needs to be shared with others. We report on several studies with avalanche forecasters that illuminated these challenges and identif...

Dashboards are the ubiquitous means of data communication within organizations. Yet we have limited understanding of how they factor into data practices in the workplace, particularly for data workers who do not self-identify as professional analysts. We focus on data workers who use dashboards as a primary interface to data, reporting on an interv...

Dashboards are the ubiquitous means of data communication within organizations.Yet we have limited understanding of how they factor into data practices in the workplace, particularly for data workers who do not self-identify as professional analysts. We focus on data workers who use dashboards as a primary interface to data, reporting on an intervi...

Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualization and analytical tools. But for many people, spreadsheets – the quintessential table tool – remain a critical part of their information ecosystem, allowing them to inter...

Risk assessment and follow-up of oral potentially malignant disorders in patients with mild or moderate oral epithelial dysplasia is an ongoing challenge for improved oral cancer prevention. Part of the challenge is a lack of understanding of how observable features of such dysplasia, gathered as data by clinicians during follow-up, relate to under...

Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualization and analytical tools. But for many people, spreadsheets -- the quintessential table tool -- remain a critical part of their information ecosystem, allowing them to int...

Ambiguity, an information state where multiple interpretations are plausible, is a common challenge in visual analytics (VA) systems. We discuss lessons learned from a case study designing VA tools for Canadian avalanche forecasters. Avalanche forecasting is a complex and collaborative risk-based decision-making and analysis domain, demanding exper...

Ambiguity, an information state where multiple interpretations are plausible, is a common challenge in visual analytics (VA) systems. We discuss lessons learned from a case study designing VA tools for Canadian avalanche forecasters. Avalanche forecasting is a complex and collaborative risk-based decision-making and analysis domain, demanding exper...

Dashboards are one of the most common use cases for data visualization, and their design and contexts of use are considerably different from exploratory visualization tools. In this paper, we look at the broad scope of how dashboards are used in practice through an analysis of dashboard examples and documentation about their use. We systematically...

Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this work, we assess the effect of social robots' roles, functions, and communication approaches in the context of...

Families preserve memories of their special and everyday experiences, though it can be hard to capture all these moments in everyday life. We explore the concept of automated forms of capturing family life and presenting them through situated, tangible everyday artifacts in the home. We designed Time-Turner, an always-on video recording system alon...

Families enjoy capturing digital media about their life and replaying moments, yet it is not always easy to do so. To explore this design space, we created a physical, ambient, and situated visualization prototype called Time-Turner specifically designed for a home setting that records video of family activities and allows families to review their...

Feedback tools help people to monitor information about themselves to improve their health, sustainability practices, or personal well-being. Yet reasoning about personal data (e.g., pedometer counts, blood pressure readings, or home electricity consumption) to gain a deep understanding of your current practices and how to change can be challenging...

We present MoComp, an interactive visualization tool that allows users to identify and understand differences in motion between two takes of motion capture data. In MoComp, the body part position and motion is visualized focusing on angles of the joints making up each body part. This makes the tool useful for between-take and even between-subject c...

In this paper we present a state of the art of the current approaches to visualization of motion capture data. We discuss the data representation, pre-processing techniques, and the design of existing tools and systems. Next we outline the advantages and disadvantages of the systems, some of which are explicitly noted by the original authors. Lastl...

Feedback tools help people to monitor information about themselves to improve their health, sustainability practices, or personal well-being. Yet reasoning about personal data (e.g., pedometer counts, blood pressure readings, or home electricity consumption) to gain a deep understanding of your current practices and how to change can be challenging...

Twitch.tv is a flagship platform for live game streaming between players and viewers. It allows players to broadcast their gameplay to a public audience where viewers chat with each other and discuss gameplay. Current tools for analyzing live game streaming and chat rooms are limited. In this paper, we describe the design of TwitchViz: a new visual...

Motionscapes-the compositions of visual forms in motion- have often been used for the evocation of affects in recent interactive artifacts and environments. While the motionscape aesthetic can be informed by art theory and history, previous empirical work investigating the affective affordances of motionscapes brings new perspectives to the design...

In this paper, two different types of personal physical activity data visualizations – a Circular Ringmap and a Virtual Pet visualization – are proposed and compared to a widely used commercial approach, the FitBit bar chart. A study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the three visualizations based on participants' task performance and...

Understanding how appliances in a house consume power is important when making intelligent and informed decisions about conserving energy. Appliances can turn ON and OFF either by the actions of occupants or by automatic sensing and actuation (e.g., thermostat). It is, also, difficult to understand how much a load consumes at any given operational...

Sustainability and energy efficiency are crucial to many sectors and all stakeholders at local, municipal, national, and global scales. According to the city of Vancouver, buildings contribute more than 50 percent of the city’s total GHG emissions. With the introduction of standards such as LEED the hope has been significant reductions in the footp...

The affectively rich expressive capacity of movement and motion is well established in art, performance, animation and visualization but research in perception, cognitive and social psychology provides only limited insight into the visual features that underpin this richness, and artistic principles are not amenable to computational modeling. Recen...

Domestic energy conservation is critical to reducing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. Personal visualization has a role to play in the design of appropriate feedback for encouraging more effective home energy use, but the unique nature of residential energy informatics introduces new design issues. This article reviews current approaches...

Data surrounds each and every one of us in our daily lives, ranging from exercise logs, to archives of our interactions with others on social media, to online resources pertaining to our hobbies. There is enormous potential for us to use these data to understand ourselves better and make positive changes in our lives. Visualization (Vis) and visual...

http://labs.fluxo.art.br/transit-debate/

Designing visualization for everyday life is challenging, yet design approaches in this field are not well explored. We propose a design approach that implements data as additional media in an existing information ecosystem rather than within a stand-alone application, hoping to enhance on-going awareness and lower the cost of long-term maintenance...

Abstract motion textures are widely applied in visual design and immersive environments such as games to imbue the environment or presentation with affect. While visual designers and artists carefully manipulate visual elements such as colour, form and motion to evoke affect, understanding what aspects of motion contribute to this still remains a m...

Designing visualizations for personal use has been catching increasing research interest. While visualization and visual analytics have primarily focused on a professional context, it remains unclear whether we can directly apply lessons we have learned from traditional visualization research and practice within a personal context without any modif...

Sustainable energy supply and demand can partially be solved by the conservation of energy, which is a personal and self-driven action. However, energy conservation currently requires the purchase of third-party products. The upfront cost of purchasing these products to monitor energy consumption in a home is a barrier that further cements the divi...

While single-accelerometers are a common consumer embedded sensors, their use in representing movement data as an intelligent resource remains scarce. Accelerometers have been used in movement recognition systems, but rarely to assess expressive qualities of movement. We present a prototype of wearable system for the real-time detection and classif...

Wayfinding (or navigation) is one of the most basic interactions within 3D video games since players need to navigate the environment before performing any other task in the game. Even so, there is little research on the difficulties, needs and preferences of players regarding wayfinding in 3D game worlds. To tackle this issue, we conducted a study...

Given that the actions of building inhabitants can account for significant variations in building energy use and their overall impact on the environment, both buildings and their systems can be designed to anticipate and even transform behavior toward more sustainable patterns of living and building use. In the residential sector, differences in in...

A home-based intelligent energy conservation system needs to know what appliances (or loads) are being used in the home and when they are being used in order to provide intelligent feedback or to make intelligent decisions. This analysis task is known as load disaggregation or non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM). The datasets used for NILM researc...

Experts consider green construction and the social, institutional, and cultural changes associated with it, through a sociological and organizational lens. Buildings are the nation's greatest energy consumers. Forty percent of all our energy is used for heating, cooling, lighting, and powering machines and devices in buildings. And despite decades...

(Fulltext download: https://repository.upou.edu.ph/handle/20.500.13073/100) We illustrate how technology has influenced creative, embodied practices in urban dance styles by analyzing how technological metaphors underlie conceptual representations of the body, space, and movement in three related styles of urban dance: liquid, digitz, and finger tu...

Energy consumption is a growing concern and it is important to inform families of their consumption and how they might reduce it. We conducted an interview study that focuses on the existing routines of families and how they currently understand their power and gas consumption based on standard utility bills. We also investigated how this understan...

Technological support for sustainable home use lies in more subtle and contextually appropriate interventions that integrate informative models of occupant behavior, provide hybrid levels of automated control, and use ambient sensing for localized decisions.

The communication of emotion and the creation of affect are core to creating immersive and engaging experiences, such as those in performance, games and simulation. They often rely on atmospheric cues that influence how an environment feels. The design of such ambient visual cues for affect is an elusive topic that has been studied by painters, the...

Games are a popular form of digital entertainment and one elusive question is how complex visual designs affect the player experience. We address one aspect of this topic in terms of similarity of visual features, explored both as an organizing principle in Gestalt psy-chology and as a theory in visual attention. To address this issue, we developed...

With the advancements in computer graphics, moving objects and animations have been widely applied to several interactive software including productive tools and video games. Examples of moving objects in games are movement of grass, simulation of weather, fireflies or other visual effects; we refer to those moving objects as ambient motion. They c...

Visual artists and designers frequently use carefully crafted motion textures -- patterns of ambient motion throughout a scene -- to imbue the atmosphere with affect. The design of such ambient visual cues is an elusive topic that has been studied by painters, theatre directors, scenic designers, lighting designers, filmmakers, producers, and artis...

This paper explores game design patterns specific to the visual presentation of game elements. Informed by the similarity theory of visual perception coupled with designers' tacit knowledge, we establish an empirical basis to investigate visual balance, specifically in terms of maintaining, disrupting, and swapping the focus of attention. Since vis...

As people become more concerned with the need to conserve their power consumption we need to find ways to inform them of how electricity is being consumed within the home. There are a number of devices that have been designed using different forms, sizes, and technologies. We are interested in large ambient displays that can be read at a glance and...

We describe a research toolset to explore visual designs in a video game. We focus specifically on visual motion, defined by attributes of motion, and their effect on accessibility, which may lead to a diminished experience for novice players. Eight expert game designers evaluated the tool embedded into a simple point and click game. Specifically t...

Visual elements such as grids, labels, and contour lines act as reference structures or visual metadata that support the primary information being presented. Such structures need to be usefully visible, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. Our goal is to determine the physical, perceptual and cognitive characteristics of such st...

Overlaid reference elements need to be sufficiently visible to effectively relate to the underlying information, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. We seek to create guidelines for presenting such structures through experimental studies to define boundary conditions for visual intrusiveness. We base our work on the practice of...

Providing effective feedback on resource consumption in the home is a key challenge of environmental conservation efforts. One promising approach for providing feedback about residential energy consumption is the use of ambient and artistic visualizations. Pervasive computing technologies enable the integration of such feedback into the home in the...

Visual elements such as grids, labels, and contour lines act as reference structures that support the primary information being presented. Such structures need to be usefully visible, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. Visual designers know how to carefully manage transparency and layering in an image to balance these elements...

3D video games are a popular form of entertainment that features elaborate visual compositions and settings. Occasionally, players are thrown into situations with a high amount of visual complexity, which may cause players, especially novice players, to misinterpret important game goals or mechanics, which may, in turn, lead to a diminished experie...

Awareness of resource consumption in the home is a key part of reducing our ecological footprint yet lack of appropriate understanding and motivation often deters residents from behaviour change. The coming deployment of smart metering technologies, the increasing practicality of embedded devices, and the widespread use of Internet and mobile tools...

The communication of emotion and the creation of affect are core to creating immersive and engaging experiences, such as those in performance, games and simulation. They often rely on atmospheric cues that influence how an environment feels. The design of such ambient visual cues for affect is an elusive topic that has been studied by painters, the...

This paper describes the design of an interactive visualization prototype, called EMVIZ, that generates abstract expressive visual representations of human movement quality. The system produces dynamic visual representations of Laban Basic-Efforts which are derived from the rigorous framework of Laban Movement Analysis. Movement data is obtained fr...

To promote sustainability consumers must be informed about their consumption behaviours. Ambient displays can be used as an eco-feedback technology to convey household consumption information. Elements of Consumption (EoC) demonstrates this by visualizing electricity, water, and natural gas consumption. EoC delivers three key components: (1) an abs...

Building eco-friendly homes with occupant intelligence as the foundation.

As part of a new CHI Sustainability Community, focused on environmental sustainability, this panel will discuss specific ways in which HCI research will be critical in finding solutions to this global challenge. While research to date has primarily focused on the end consumer, the panel will be challenged with enlarging the discussion to include th...

A sustainable home is more than a green building: it is also a living experience that encourages occupants to use fewer resources more effectively. Research has shown that small changes in behaviour in how we use our homes can result in substantial energy and water savings. The design dialogue in the development of efficient buildings has largely f...

Motion provides a rich modality for communicating emotion and creating affect, and developing techniques for analyzing, manipulating and enhancing animations in video and computer graphics is an active research area. However, we have little empirical evidence of how particular attributes of motion elicit particular impressions. In this paper we des...

Engaging occupants in conservation efforts is a key part of reducing our ecological footprint. To this end, we have developed the Aware Living Interface System (ALIS), an integrated in-home system that supports residents in awareness of resource use, facilitates efficient control of house systems, and encourages conservation in daily activities. In...

Energy and resource management is an important and growing research area at the intersection of conservation, sustainable design, alternative energy production, and social behavior. Energy consumption can be significantly reduced by simply changing how occupants inhabit and use buildings, with little or no additional costs. Reflecting this fact, an...

Commercial websites offer many items to potential site users. However, most current websites display results of a search in text lists, or as lists sorted on one or two single criteria. Finding the best item in a text list based on multi-priority criteria is an exhausting task, especially for long lists. Visualizing search results and enabling user...

Supporting sustainable resource use in the home requires a range of feedback techniques to enable informed decision-making. These techniques can include traditional screen-based interfaces, but these tools often require too much effort and attention from already-busy residents. An alternative approach is the provision of ambient and artistic visual...

In this paper we introduce Musician Map, a web-based interactive tool for visualizing relationships among popular musicians who have released recordings since 1950. Musician Map accepts search terms from the user, and in turn uses these terms to retrieve data from MusicBrainz.org and AudioScrobbler.net, and visualizes the results. Musician Map visu...

Recent work has shown the potential of basic perceptual properties of motion for notification, association and visual search. Yet evidence from fields as diverse as perceptual science, social psychology and the performing arts suggest that motion has much richer communication potential in its interpretative scope. A long history of research and pra...

Visual elements such as grids, labels, and contour lines act as "reference structures" or "visual metadata" that support the primary information being presented. Such structures need to be usefully visible, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. Our goal is to determine the physical, perceptual and cognitive characteristics of suc...

Content based image retrieval is an approach for facilitating the searching and browsing of large image collections. In this approach, image analysis is conducted on low level visual properties extracted from the image. We believed that in order to create an effective image retrieval system, visual perception must be taken into account. We conjectu...

Most approaches to representing causality, such as the common causal graph, require a separate and static view, but in many cases it is useful to add the dimension of causality to the context of an existing visualization. Building on research from perceptual psychology that shows the perception of causality is a low-level visual event derived from...

Grid design is surprisingly subtle. A grid that is too bold distracts and obscures, but one that is too light is illegible. A well-designed grid is legible when required, but does not create visual clutter or compete for attention with the information it supports. From the disciplines of art and graphic design, we know that there are many dimension...

Collaboration often relies on all group members having a shared view of a single-user application. A common situation is a single active presenter sharing a live view of her workstation screen with a passive audience, using simple hardware-based video signal projection onto a large screen or simple bitmap-based sharing protocols. This offers simpli...

Abstract In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation of the utility of several perceptual properties of motion,in information-dense displays applied to notification. Notification relates to awareness,and how dynamic information is communicated,from the system to the user. Key to a notification technique is how,easily the notification is d...

Notification systems attempt to deliver current, important information to the computer screen in an efficient and effective manner. All notification systems require that the user attends to them to at least some degree if they are to succeed. Examples of notification systems include instant messaging systems, system and user status updates, email a...

Peer-to-peer technology and wireless networking offer great potential for working together away from the desk - but they also introduce unique software and infrastructure challenges. The traditional idea of the work environment is anchored to a central location - the desk and office - where the resources needed for the job are located. Even in the...

Visualizing information in user interfaces to complex, large-scale systems is difficult due to visual fragmentation caused by an enormous amount of inter-related data distributed across multiple views. New display dimensions are required to help the user visually integrate and filter such spatially distributed and heterogeneous information. Motion...

CSCW is one mechanism by which the TeleLearning Exchange Project promotes collaboration in the interdisciplinary research of the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (TL-NCE). Affiliated researchers are encouraged to share informal knowledge of their projects via three major strategies: site visits by an integration officer, a community We...

Visualizing information in user interfaces to complex, large-scale systems is difficult due to visual fragmentation caused by an enormous amount of inter-related data distributed across multiple views. New display dimensions are required to help the user perceptually integrate and filter such spatially distributed and heterogeneous information. Mot...

Current user interfaces to complex systems suffer from data displays which are increasingly cumbersome since the representation techniques exceed the human's perceptual capacity to efficiently interpret them. New display dimensions are required to support the user in integrating and relating information across displays and representations. Advances...

Visualizing information in user interfaces to complex, large-scale systems is difficult due to an enormous amount of dynamic data distributed across multiple displays. While graphical represen- tation techniques can reduce some of the cognitive overhead associated with comprehension, cur- rent interfaces suffer from the over-use of such representat...

Many information structures are represented as two-dimensional networks (connected graphs) of links and nodes. Because these network tend to be large and quite complex, people often perfer to view part or all of the network at varying levels of detail. Hierarchical clustering provides a framework for viewing the network at different levels of detai...

Navigating and viewing large information spaces, such as hierarchically-organized networks from complex realtime systems, suffer the problems of viewing a large space on a small screen. Distorted-view approaches, such as fisheye techniques, have great potential to reduce these problems by representing detail within its larger context but introduce...

Supervisory control systems (SCS), such as those used in process control, are notable for very large information spaces, highly concurrent activity and time-critical operator and system response. The arduous task of monitoring and controlling the physical process is exacerbated by the cognitive burden of comprehending and manipulating the interface...

While most supervisory control system interfaces use multiple screens, they lack support for understanding, navigating and manipulating the underlying information space. The authors propose the Intelligent Zoom as a network system metaphor which will provide the needed support. The authors use the zoom as an overview screen, to which additional wor...

We present algorithms and their implementation in the ZOOM ILLUSTRATOR which enable textual labels to " float"around rendered images to which they refer. The labeling remains consistent, even when the image is rotated or scaled. Furthermore, the level of detail of the labeling adjusts to the screen space available. This is accomplished using fishey...

We present the continuous zoom, a distorted view method for displaying hierarchically-organized, two-dimensional networks. The method is suitable for large networks, such as those found in interfaces to complex supervisory control systems. The continuous zoom shows detail in context, unlike simple pan and zoom techniques, and allows for more than o...

User interfaces to supervisory control systems are becoming unmanageably complex; operators are spending significant time and cognitive effort in managing the interface which impedes the tasks of managing the control system. We present a user interface technique for supervisory control systems which uses adaptive presentation to provide context-sen...