| Summary: | Physical visualizations exist from the very beginning of human history. Now that we are making all program "paperless" or "digital," there still are some scenarios will benefit more from physical objects due to their tangibility and their capacity to be grasped and reshaped. The intention of my work is to propose a new visual encoding that maps information to a physical form in order to enhance the efficiency of group planning. I am exploring building up a culturally neutral
language that is visually formed so that people from different backgrounds can share basic understanding easily and simultaneously. My initial experiment is a prototype of a set of physical objects. It contains a magnetic base, a set of information sheets, a vacant transparent sheet, a few markers, and some colored magnetic tokens. By assembling the tokens and changing the data simultaneously, users can easily exchange their decisions and share immediate thoughts with other
participants. In other words, I intend to design a visual toolkit as a language to help people engaging more with information and better communicate to other people. Instead of just talking about conflicts and picturing them independently in minds, I am proposing to put them in visual forms so we can point at and in tangible form so we can grasp it and make changes immediately. I hope this project will not only benefit group planning process but also provide a novel way to visualize
real-life problems by users themselves and help them make better decisions. My primary contribution is a visualization toolkit design, I also provide an informal user study in order to find usability problems with my prototype.
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