Collaboration Dynamics in Constructive Physicalization of Shared Personal Data
There is evidence that constructing a data physicalization can empower a diverse audience to engage in data understanding and decision making. Although the hands-on nature of data physicalization construction enables a familiar way for people to collaboratively construct and interact with representations, we do not know how this collaboration happens. We conducted a qualitative study with 12 participants (six couples) to better understand how people collaborate to construct a physicalization, using a combination of elicitation diary and semi-structured interviews over a period of several weeks.We found that participants employed three main styles of collaboration - mutual, exclusive and dictator, when working together to construct a physicalization. We found that such collaboration styles are facilitated through actions such as discussion, distributing tasks, and preparing and assembling tokens. Informed by our findings, we discuss: i) similarities and differences between previously proposed physicalization workflows in the literature and ours, and ii) research directions to foster collaboration in data physicalization processes.
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