Saturday, March 7, 2009

Imprint, a Community Visualization of Printer Data : Designing for Open-ended Engagement on Sustainability

Zachary Pousman, Hafez Rouzati, John Stasko
Note at CSCW'08

This paper presents Imprint, a casual information visualization designed as a technology probe for seeding reflection on printing practices in the workplace. Imprint is situated in the printer room of the workplace, on a LCD screen, showing various information visualizations at intervals to engage users in their printing practices. The paper describes five of the existing eight visualizations, and the projects intends to build upon users' experience to create new visualizations (I like this methodology of building upon users' experience with existing open-ended technology, for more you can read the technology probes paper, Hutchinson et al. CHI 2003, or my paper at DIS, Riche et al. 2008).

The first visualization is a tag cloud showing the most popular words found in people's printouts. The second visualization is a bar chart showing how many times a member of the workgroup was mentioned in the printouts. The third visualization uses network analysis (PCA) to compute a distance between members of the workgroup based on the printouts, and displays this distance on a world map. The fourth visualization is a pie chart showing printer's activity (idle, single sided, double sided), and the associated cost. It also displays a heat map showing printer's activity per day periods. The fifth visualization provides the cost of operating the Imprint system.

The underlying idea of this project, which is ongoing at Georgia Tech, is to raising discussions about people's behaviors regarding printing. The Imprint system is an open-ended, provocative piece in that regard, allowing users to de-familiarize themselves with their current behavior. Users can print out visualizations presented by Imprint and use them to discuss, or share with others.

I like the fact that it aims at creating a social forum around sensible issues while maintaining playfulness. This is definitely something worth getting inspired from.

keywords: feedback technology, social norms, behavior change

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