Data Sensification: beyond representation modality, toward encoding data in experience
Trevor Hogan · Proceedings of DRS · 2018
Humans have represented data for thousands of years, yet the design process we use to encode data remains almost exclusively related to modalities such as visual, haptic, auditory, olfactory and gustatory. This paper proposes a novel approach to designing data representations, where we move beyond mapping data to a modality or combination of modalities and instead facilitate an understanding of the underlying data through people’s overall experience of it. Based on a review of existing data representations that fall into this research area, but have not been discussed under one common term, this paper defines, for the first time, the term Data Sensification. Data Sensification is an emerging form of representation that encodes data in the behaviour, performance, affordances and resulting experience of a data representation. This research contributes to the on-going research on data representation beyond the visual paradigm as well as conceptualizing a new approach to representing data beyond representational modalities.