Design by Immersion: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Problem-Driven Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'design by immersion,' a novel transdisciplinary methodology for problem-driven visualization that involves researchers and domain experts deeply engaging in each other's work to foster innovation and collaboration.

Contribution

The paper defines and advocates for 'design by immersion,' a new approach that centers transdisciplinary experiences in visualization projects, supported by six case studies demonstrating its benefits.

Findings

Enables exploration of new visualization design spaces

Enhances domain understanding through personal experience

Builds strong transdisciplinary relationships

Abstract

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that advance all disciplines involved. In this paper we introduce and define a new methodological paradigm we call design by immersion, which provides an alternative perspective on problem-driven visualization work. Design by immersion embeds transdisciplinary experiences at the center of the visualization process by having visualization researchers participate in the work of the target domain (or domain experts participate in visualization research). Based on our own combined experiences of working on cross-disciplinary, problem-driven visualization projects, we present six case studies that expose the opportunities that design by immersion enables, including (1) exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces, (2) enriching domain understanding through personal experiences, and (3) building strong transdisciplinary relationships. Furthermore, we illustrate how the process of design by immersion opens up a diverse set of design activities that can be combined in different ways depending on the type of collaboration, project, and goals. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential pitfalls of design by immersion.

Tables

Table 1. Table 1: Activities and their connections to the opportunities of design by immersion. Activities are classified as D ata analysis, S tudy methods, P rototyping, L earning about the domain, and C ommunicating with collaborators. Numbers in the three columns are linked to the case studies.

Design by Immersion Activities		Enrich Domain Understanding	Explore
New Spaces	Build
Relationships
\arrayrulecolor lightgray \rowcolorplatinum D-1	Undertake domain-specific data analysis independently	$1,4,5,6$		$5$
\rowcolor platinum D-2	Enrich datasets meaningfully by deriving new data	$5$	$4,5$	$4$
\rowcolor platinum D-3	Analyze data collaboratively with domain experts	$3,4,5,6$		$3,4,5,6$
S-1	Observe domain experts practices unobtrusively in situ	$2,6$
S-2	Keep documentation of experiences	$1,6$		$4$
S-3	Interview collaborators	2
S-4	Attend meetings and discussions in the other domain	$2,5$	$5$	$5$
\rowcolor platinum P-1	Develop visualizations in the context of evolving collaborative research projects with multiple disciplines	$5$	$4,5$	$4,5$
\rowcolor platinum P-2	Develop visual encodings that explicitly incorporate and take inspiration from domain knowledge and practices	$3$	$4,6$
\rowcolor platinum P-3	Start ideating early in the design process using pre-existing domain knowledge	$5$	$1,3,4,5$
\rowcolor platinum P-4	Iterate rapidly and collaboratively on designs by leveraging informal domain expert feedback	$5$	$1,4,5$
\rowcolor platinum P-5	Self-critique designs from the visualization and domain perspectives		$3,4,5,6$
L-1	Engage directly with both domain-specific and visualization literature	$3,4,5,6$	$3,5$	$3,5,6$
L-2	Gain broader exposure to domain concepts beyond domain problem	$5,6$	$5,6$	$5$
L-3	Establish domain-based design considerations for visualizations	$5$	$5,4,6$	$5$
L-4	Receive informal training from collaborators	$1$		$5$
L-5	Participate in simulations of domain work	$2$		$2$
\rowcolor platinum C-1	Use language that resonates with collaborators	$3,5$	$4$	$4,5,6$
\rowcolor platinum C-2	Relate across disciplines through common knowledge and experiences		$5$	$1,4,5,6$
\rowcolor platinum C-3	Engage in informal peer-to-peer communication with domain experts about domain science and visualizations	$4,5,6$	$4,5,6$	$4,5,6$
\rowcolor platinum C-4	Translate concepts and material for design team members coming from predominantly visualization or target domain backgrounds	$3$		$3,6$
\rowcolor platinum C-5	Brainstorm with collaborators about methods that would best elicit implicit knowledge	$2$	$2$	$2$
\arrayrulecolor black

Table 2. Table 2: An example immersion trajectory.

Stages	Immersion Trajectory Activities
Stage #1: Establishing basic
domain
knowledge	Take introductory course(s) in a domain if you have no prior education or experience with that domain \arrayrulecolor lightgray Find a domain expert who is willing to support the immersion process Read introductory background domain literature Start attending group meetings of domain researchers
Stage #2:
Gaining
domain
research exposure	Read domain research literature \arrayrulecolor lightgray Start working co-located with domain experts Undertake independent domain-specific data analysis Work collaboratively with domain experts to tackle domain questions and data analysis challenges
Stage #3:
Establishing
broader
domain reputation	Collaboratively engage with domain experts to prepare a domain-specific paper related to your work with them \arrayrulecolor lightgray Attend domain-specific events (e.g., a conference)

Table 3. Table 3: Questions for immersive experiences as inspired by experiential learning literature. Concrete experience themes are quoted directly from Morris’ recent review on concrete experience and experiential learning [ 31 , p.4] .

Concrete Experience Themes[31]	Immersive Experience Questions
Hands on participation: Involved, active, participants in real-world uncontrived scenarios	How will you be active and participating in the domain? If the real-world activity was modified to make it accessible to you (the visualization researcher), how specifically has the activity changed? How might those changes affect your understandings of the domain?
Situated in context: Rich contextual information	What are the contextual factors influencing the activity and your participation (for example, social factors)? Which contextual factors does your design respect, and which are you disrupting?
Critical reflection: Contextual conditions of problem considered	How will you reflect on your activities and experiences to develop your own mental models and domain understanding?
Purposeful — pragmatic: Solving real-world problems	How could the activity (as completed by you or a domain expert) help advance the domain?
Risk — novel problems: Out of comfort zone: temporary destabilization	What are the specific risks associated with you activity? What is your own risk tolerance?

Full text

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\vgtcinsertpkg Introduction

In 1986, McCormick et al. [25] advocated that scientists, engineers and visualization researchers should form collaborative teams such that domain needs and processes provide a basis for solving visualization challenges. However, realizing this vision is complex as there are multiple paradigms for research involving different disciplines. Kirby and Meyer [20] characterize multidisciplinary work as addressing challenges that, while being associated with specific domains, require expertise from multiple disciplines. In the multidisciplinary paradigm, “researchers work in parallel with clearly defined roles and specific tasks that provide added benefit to their disciplinary goal” [20, p.83]. They describe the interdisciplinary research paradigm as addressing problems lying outside disciplinary confines, requiring the intersection of multiple disciplines. In this paper, we present a methodology, design by immersion, that is based on a third paradigm we characterize as transdisciplinarity where the lines between visualization researchers and domain experts blur as individuals move beyond working in a single domain. The immersive designer works—partially or fully—in both their home discipline (visualization or domain) and the ‘other’ discipline (domain or visualization). Design by immersion has many benefits. It can facilitate collaboration and accelerate project development by building trust and deepening the dialogue between collaborators. From a visualization perspective, it expands the portfolio of existing visualization design processes in ways that encourage active participation of domain experts in the visualization process, allowing for the fluid integration of visualization processes and domains as well as novel perspectives on visualization. Design by immersion also fosters personal development, such as the acquisition of new skills and experiences, enabling a better understanding of different research perspectives and practices. We do not claim that design by immersion is “better” than existing practises, but it can offer new ways of looking at visualization design. Design by immersion is well suited to problem-driven visualization work.

In contrast to technique-driven visualization which aims to create “new and better techniques without necessarily establishing a strong connection to a particular documented user need”, the goal of problem-driven visualization is “to work with real users to solve their real-world problems” [40, p.2432]. However, problem-driven visualization research comes with challenges introduced by gaps in both knowledge bases and cultures [18, 33, 41, 40, 27, 26, 32]. In response to these challenges, the visualization community has developed guidelines for problem-driven and multidisciplinary visualization projects [45, 40, 43]. Specific design and workshop activities [18, 27], visualization models [33], and collaborative paradigms [43, 44] have been explored for engaging with domain experts. However, as Wood et al. note, visualization literature generally creates an opposition between visualization and domain experts [46]. For example, in their nine-stage design study methodology framework, Sedlmair *et al.*advocate that researchers should clearly identify collaborators’ roles prior to characterizing a domain and engaging in the design process [40]. Similarly, action design research [41] (suggested by McCurdy et al.[26] as a visualization design framework) advocates for clearly assigning roles in collaborative problem-driven design projects. In contrast, a growing number of visualization case studies report a blurring of the boundaries between visualization and target domains [12, 11, 46, 16, 1]. In these instances, the roles of the researchers involved cannot be distinctly classified and may have even shifted over the course of the collaboration. Even though Sedlmair et al.[40] call for role definition, they concede that problem-driven visualization work may involve a single person in the role of both visualization and domain expert. Similarly, Wong et al. [45, p.1] note that visualization “tools historically required the users to not only be domain experts, i.e., have expertise in a specific discipline, but also have the time and motivation to become visualization experts.”

While previous work hints at the benefits of transdisciplinary approaches to problem-driven visualization work, methodologies to facilitate such work are absent in the literature. Using our own experiences working on distinct transdisciplinary visualization projects, we introduce design by immersion as a paradigm that captures and supports transdisciplinary approaches to problem-driven visualization where visualization experts immerse themselves in a target domain in order to inform visualization processes, and/or domain experts actively engage in visualization design processes to help explore and define visual solutions to their real-world problems.

Design by immersion is similar to cultural immersion—the direct experiencing of and engagement with communities, environments, and/or languages that are different from one’s own. Work in education, cultural studies, sociology, and ethnography has shown that cultural immersion enables a first-hand experience of the target community/environment/language that remote studies cannot provide [35]. Cultural immersion can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the target scenario’s characteristics, corresponding processes, and challenges, and to an increased awareness of one’s own assumptions and biases in relation to the target domain.

Design by immersion is connected to experiential learning. As Kolb states: “Knowledge results from the combination of grasping and transforming experience” [21, p.51] and “[experiential] Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.” [21, p.49]. Much has been written about the positive impacts of experiential learning [8, 15, 22, 23, 30]. Transdisciplinary experiences offer researchers opportunities to encounter and learn more richly about other domains and to transfer this knowledge to visualization design.

Leveraging the ideas of cultural immersion and experiential learning, we consider design by immersion as a new way to describe and guide collaborative visualization research. In this paper, we illustrate how design by immersion can be applied to a broad range of collaborative problem-driven visualization scenarios using a number of case studies. We discuss the opportunities it supports, including: exploring new domain-inspired visualization design spaces (e.g., new domain-focused charts in Case Study #6); enriching domain understanding through personal experiences (e.g., development of a PhD thesis in Case Study #5); and building strong transdisciplinary relationships (e.g., ongoing collaborative publications in Case Study #4). We provide hands-on guidance on how to engage in design by immersion with concrete, modular design activities that can be tailored to different types of projects. Finally, we reflect on the potential challenges of this method.

This paper contributes: (1) a new methodology to support transdisciplinary problem-driven visualization research, (2) an illustration of design by immersion using a range of different real-world visualization case studies with a discussion of the opportunities that design by immersion introduces to visualization research in general, and (3) guidance for approaching design by immersion in visualization research with a discussion of potential challenges.

1 Related Work

Our work builds and expands on previous research in problem-driven visualization and design studies. Design by immersion is related to grounded evaluation [16] and pre-design empiricism [2], both of which advocate the use of exploratory qualitative studies to inform design. However, the activities and themes in our approach go beyond treating the other domain as the object of study.

1.1 Frameworks to Guide Problem-Driven Visualization

A number of frameworks and guidelines attempt to systematize the process of problem-driven visualization, conducting design studies, and working with domain experts. Munzner’s nested model [33] deconstructs problem-driven visualization design into four components (domain problem and data characterization; operation and data type abstraction; visual encoding and interaction design; and algorithm design) while emphasizing evaluation. Design study methodology was described in the nine-stage framework by Sedlmair et al. [40], which provides the high-level stages of a design study. Their work and discussions highlight the multidisciplinary nature of visualization design studies. The Design Activity Framework [27] contributes structure to the process by breaking visualization design down into a set of activities (understand, ideate, make, deploy) that consist of motivations, methods, and outcomes. Wong et al. [45] present a characterization of domain experts, features of visualization systems for those experts, and corresponding design guidelines. However, visualization literature tends to separate visualization and domain experts into explicitly distinct groups [33, 40, 27, 45]. There is often an implicit or explicit assumption that the visualization researcher designs a visualization for a particular domain (or problem) [29, 19, 36, 14]. Such perspectives do not capture the possibility and potential benefits of design by immersion—a deeply collaborative visualization design process where domain-inspired solutions arise from transdisciplinary practices and contribute to all disciplines involved.

Nevertheless, design by immersion aligns with and extends existing themes in the literature. For example, Simon et al.[43] introduce the design study Liaison role in which an individual team member (either a domain or visualization expert) with additional knowledge in the “other” discipline facilitates visualization design by, in part, serving as a knowledge conduit between disciplines. There are similarities between Liaison-supported design studies and design by immersion, and an immersed researcher is well positioned to serve as a Liaison. Transitioning to design by immersion involves shifting from a role-based paradigm with an individual bridging the separate domain and visualization spheres to a collaborative process that brings together the two spheres. Design by immersion can be considered as a broader transdisciplinary approach and mindset that aims at collaboratively identifying and leveraging synergies between the domain and visualization spheres, allowing visualization design processes and roles to fluidly evolve, eventually blurring disciplinary boundaries.

1.2 Action Design Research

Considering design research from beyond the field of visualization, strategies exist that offer a wider view of the role of the target domain in visualization design. For example, Action Design Research (ADR) approaches design from the perspective that technological artifacts represent both design knowledge (visualization theory) and design context (target domain knowledge and influences from users) [41, 26]. ADR emphasizes the interconnected nature of: 1) building tools, 2) intervening in the target domain via these tools, and 3) evaluating what has been built. In ADR, these tasks are tightly bound in successive build-intervene-evaluate cycles where “evaluation is not a separate stage of the research process that follows building” [41, p.43]. However, ADR promotes an artifact-centric perspective to design with a particular focus on evolution as well as target domain intervention and disruption. It does not explore transdisciplinary opportunities and their impact.

1.3 Participatory Design

Designers are increasingly focused on including users and stakeholders in the design process. For example, participatory design (e.g.,  [39]) is explicitly multidisciplinary and collaborative. Participatory design has been used by a number of visualization researchers (e.g.,  [10, 3, 37, 28, 24]), and Sanders *et al.*have previously proposed a framework to organize participatory design tools and processes [38]. Based on Muller’s survey [32] of participatory design approaches, its characteristic interdisciplinarity (what Muller calls hybridity) stems from settings, activities and artifacts that encourage the creation of interdisciplinary spaces where designers and users meet to discuss and actively work through potentially differing perspectives. In the context of visualization, participatory design varies substantially from discussions with domain experts [10, 3], through potential users sketching design solutions [37, 28] and using real domain data as a mediator in data-driven wireframes and prototypes [24], to domain experts creating paper prototypes of their ideas [10]. While design by immersion aligns with ideas of stakeholder involvement as in participatory design, it also goes beyond them. In design by immersion, collaborations between stakeholders and designers shift from being structured through interdisciplinary spaces, artifacts and decisions to involving the personal acquisition of skills and field expertise in the visualization domain and/or the stakeholders’ domain. Design by immersion emphasizes the transdisciplinary transformation of individuals and the opportunities these transformations present for design. By engaging potential users and stakeholders in the design process, participatory design invites crossover between domains, and could serve as a starting point for transitioning to design by immersion.

1.4 Transdisciplinary Visualization Work

Design by immersion also relates to ideas from the digital humanities where visualization has started to play an increasingly important role as a new methodology [17]. Hinrichs et al. have discussed the role of visualization as a mediator between visualization and humanities researchers, and as a transdisciplinary speculative process advancing all disciplines involved [13]. This work emphasizes the importance of considering visualization as a process that not only enables communication between different disciplines, but also allows a collaborative reflection on assumptions inherent in each discipline. Our work builds on this research by defining and situating design by immersion in the broader transdisciplinary context of problem-driven visualization.