Casual Infovis - definition

reflections from a georgia tech student, John Stasko

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~john.stasko/papers/infovis07-casual.pdf

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"In our view the Ambient Infovis, Social Infovis,
and Artistic Infovis systems, as well as other new domains and uses
of visualization point to a complement to traditional infovis that we
call Casual Information Visualization (Casual Infovis). All of these
sub-domains share the same relationship to more traditional infovis
research, that of center and margin. Though each sub-domain has its
own character, we propose Casual Infovis as an umbrella term that reframes
ambient, social, and artistic infovis, as well other edge cases as
a part of, but different from, more traditional infovis systems and techniques.

We note four differences between traditional infovis systems
and Casual Infovis.

* User Population: The user population is enlarged to include a
wide spectrum of users from experts to novices. Users are not
necessarily expert in analytic thinking, nor are they required to
be experts at reading visualizations.

* Usage Pattern: Usage expands past work, to focus on other parts
of life. Systems are intended for usage that is momentary and
repeatable (over weeks and months), or contemplative (a long
moment at an art gallery).

* Data type: The data is typically personally important and relevant,
as opposed to work-motivated. This means that a user’s
relationship to the data is often a more tightly coupled one.

* Insight: We propose that the kinds of insight that Casual Infovis
may support are different from more traditional systems. We
suggest that developers are interested in providing insight about
data that is not analytical, but instead of a different sort.


Thus, we define: Casual Infovis is the use of computer mediated
tools to depict personally meaningful information in visual ways that
support everyday users in both everyday work and non-work situations."


"Casual Infovis shifts the goals of the systems that are built; system designers
focus on creating insights that are different from the design
goals of traditional infovis systems. If infovis is intended, according
to Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman, to amplify cognition and
to provide insight, what does this insight consist of? What may help
to define Casual Infovis systems is to explore the shift in these edge
case’s sense of providing insight."

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key impact: infovis leads to the paradigm shift of information --> insight