Visualizing Cities | Workshop 2019

Thematic Background

Visualization as a tool for analysis, exploration and communication has become a driving force in the task of unravelling the complex urban fabrics that form our cities. Yet, there is a crucial need to bridge the gap between the flood of urban data and the capacity of decision makers to integrate that data into effective and informed decisions. The CityVis workshop wants to critically assess this notion and ask how data and data visualization can be used to serve and better understand or even organize urban processes, focusing on an explicitly “human-centric” perspective. This perspective should support and improve the understanding and the utilizations of data for all stakeholders - from governments and companies to citizens.

Workshop focus

The citizens are fundamental to all urban systems including health, transport, culture, housing, energy and civic issues. Focus specifically on the role of citizens in urban data visualization will allow us to not only understand the role of citizens in the data collection and dissemination, but also in the emerging practices as a whole. We are interested for example in exploring how citizens can and should be involved in smart city practices, and how this will impact visualization design decisions. During the workshop we would like to outline the specific field and therefore invite innovative ideas, design concepts, requirement analysis and work-in-progress in the following technical scope:

Human visualization interaction and user-centric design e.g. co-creation design methods, visualization for decision support and decision making, evaluation methods, requirement analysis, visualizations for experts vs. general public
Urban data as the basis for urban data visualization e.g. citizen science, open data portals, quantified self, crowdsourcing data / volunteered information, transparency in data collection and processing
Visualization contexts e.g. visualization of urban processes, right to the city, production of space, governance, participation and transparency, visualizing plans, design, scenarios or futures
Disruptive technologies e.g. open source, analytics and workflows, machine learning, AI, tangible interfaces, immersive technologies
Visualization challenges e.g. uncertainty visualization, spatio-temporal visualization, network visualization

During the workshop, participants will be given a brief introductory presentation by the organizers to outline the workshop scope, followed by a selection of case study presentations (chosen from the accepted papers). The rest of the workshop will consist of interactive activities, making use of creative design thinking techniques, to encourage participants to collaboratively try to refine the definition of the urban data visualization theme. Through this first interactive workshop, we aim to establish a definition, goals, and challenges for urban visualizations.

The CityVis workshop is open for all IEEE Vis Participants.*

Workshop Outcome

We would like to thank: all our CityVis speakers, our invited guests: Andy Yan, SFU CIty Program, Lorraine Copas, SPARC BC and Sarah Ross TransLink who each presented and formed our practitioner panel for Q&A, all our workshop attendees, our program committee and IEEE VIS 2019 for hosting us.