I Was Here: Digital Traces as Design Material

Abstract

Visitors of the 2023 info+ website became part of a visualization that showed user traces on the website. In the physical world, traces of people are everywhere — broken twigs as evidence of a new path in the forest, graffiti tags on public restrooms, or a light shine on walls where naturally oily hands touched the surface. Intentional or not, a person’s interaction with their environment becomes part of that environment. As ubiquitous as material traces are, visual digital traces remain surprisingly bare. Our experiment is an impulse towards using digital traces as design material in visualization: They blur the boundaries between visualization authors and readers; complicate questions surrounding authorship and agency; change the ways in which visualizations are read; and trouble the notion of participation in personalized data displays.

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