by Yanni Loukissas, Ploypilin Pruekcharoen, Emily Weigel, Miles Appleton
For humans, all data are felt experiences. Unlike our computers, which can only be data-driven, we must hold data in tandem with our feelings about the subjects they represent. In this project, developed in javaScript (p5.JS) we explore designs for an affective data setting: an arena in which participants can reflect on their feeling-based judgements about a subject in relation to relevant evidence. Displayed on a 30-foot wide, architectural scale media canvas at the center of an urban university campus, the project invites passersby to interact with and orientate themselves in relation to data on new stories about the environmental and human health effects of microplastics. Our project, which includes qualitative reflections on its production and reception, offers lessons about how public data visualizations can resonate on an emotional register. At the heart of the project is a human question, what can data do: not just for us instrumentally, but to us emotionally?
Chromatic Lens: An augmented-reality inquiry into the color data of eBird
by Yanni Loukissas, Emily Weigel, Michael Zhou, and Shruti Vedula
Chromatic Lens (formerly Eco Glass) is an augmented-reality data visualization developed for the Apple iPad, which uses color data extracted from photos in eBird: a collective database of over 100 million bird sightings (images). The application, written in p5.js (a JavaScript library) works like an interactive applique, layered over the live video feed of the iPad’s built-in camera.
This is work that I have undertaken with a small, interdisciplinary team of faculty and students (Shruti Vedula, Emily Weigel, and Michael Zhou) drawn together by a shared interest in exploring the educational potential of creating local, augmented-reality data visualization projects, as an alternative to the use of generic platforms, such as “Google Glass.” We have found that creating and using local lenses to explore the environment can help students think critically about more-than-human relationships.
For Chromatic Lens we leveraged abundant photographic documentation on local birds—rock pigeons, brown thrashers, northern cardinals, red-tailed hawks, among others—to help students understand the more-than-human significance of color on our campus. For example, Chromatic Lens helped students see how environmental changes due to both global climate shifts and local development projects can make life difficult for birds that rely on color to hide from predators or to be noticed by potential mates. The paper draws on a situated analysis conducted for two educational workshops. Our findings reveal the strengths and limitations of Chromatic Lens, as well as the broader significance of creating augmented-reality data projects in the context of STS education about more-than-human relationships.
If we want to understand the affective power of data in shaping our experiences of place, we need new forms of inquiry that reveal what data can do: not just for us, but to us. In this paper, we explore how engaging with data changes the way we feel about environmental concerns that we live with through an approach we call local data memoir. This approach brings together autobiographical making and writing with theorization through a phenomenological lens, specifically using the concept of orientation. We find that attending to our own orientation can be a useful means of tracking how our lived experiences are shaped by practices with data. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we demonstrate how the phenomenological concept of orientation can be used to interpret encounters with data; second, we introduce local data memoirs as a form of affective inquiry with data.
Sylvia Janicki and Yanni Alexander Loukissas. 2025. Making Local Data Memoirs: Changing Orientations in Relation to Environmental Concerns. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2047–2061. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735760
Over the past decade public institutions have put considerable resources towards improving the quality and availability of civic data, such as budget and expenditure information, building permits, air quality readings, police incidents, and property ownership records. The agencies behind these efforts claim that data sets alone are sufficient to create transparency, increase civic engagement, foster innovation, and ultimately make our communities more sustainable. However, making civic data accessible does not necessarily make them valuable or actionable. To take effective and ethical action, we need contextual information about the processes involved in creating, managing, and interpreting civic data. In this modular, multi-day tool, you will create an accessible, practical guide to an existing civic data set. Working through the modules below can help you, and subsequently others, engage with civic data in productive ways.
The overarching goal of the Map Room / Map Spot Project is to develop local spaces for grassroots map-making, where people can creatively and collaboratively explore data. Conventional digital maps can help people see rapid, large-scale social and environmental changes, even as they unfold. But often these maps are based on abstract data alone and are, therefore, disconnected from the lived experiences of their audiences. The Map Room / Map Spot Project aims to empower people to understand, but also challenge and even redefine the stories that maps and data tell about their lives, and about the places they live.
This project is an expansion of the St.Louis Map Room, originally created in 2017 by the Office of Creative Research in partnership with COCA. In the summer of 2018, funding from DILAC and NSF enabled us to build a new, research-oriented Map Room on the Georgia Tech campus. Our research questions include the following: what counts as civic data? what does an effective conversation around civic data look like? how can civic data become the source materials for acts of creative and collaborative expression, and to what end?
Last year, in 2019, renewed funding enabled us to create a more versatile map-making system, which we call “Map Spot.” This new, low-cost prototype enables temporary, pop-up map-making spaces virtually anywhere. We have already tested the system at high schools, museums, conferences, and design offices across the United States.
Most recently, we have begun using Map Room technology for resilience planning as part of the Smart Sea Level Sensor team, “a collaboration among Chatham Emergency Management Agency officials, City of Savannah officials, and Georgia Tech researchers who are working together to install a network of internet-enabled sea level sensors across Chatham County.”
Apparatus:
The Map Room is best understood as a hybrid map-making tool, that is both digital and hands-on. Accessibility is the priority and people, not machines, are in control. Participants use our custom-designed software, built on the infrastructure of OpenStreetMaps, to identify a geographic region they want to map. This must be an area that they already know well. They can then select from a variety of preloaded data overlays to work with, for example from government, academic, or commercial sources. The resulting image is sent to an overhead projector, which illuminates a large-format sheet of paper and guides participants as they use pens, markers, paint, collage materials—any visual media of their choice—to create physical maps that juxtapose existing data with representations of their own lived experiences.
Example Map:
Current Team: Nicholas Boshart, Sukhmai Kapur, Yanni Loukissas, Jude Ntabathia, Jer Thorp
Past Team Members: Muniba Khan, Lucas Phillips, Christopher Polack, Annabel Rothschild, Jihan Sherman, Raya Ward
