Design Strategies and Optimizations for Human-Data Interaction Systems in Museums

Embodied interaction is particularly useful in museums because it allows to leverage findings from embodied cognition to support the learning of STEM concepts and thinking skills. In this paper, we focus on Human-Data Interaction (HDI), a class of embodied interactions that investigates the design of interactive data visualizations that users control with gestures and body movements. We describe an HDI system that we iteratively designed, implemented, and observed at a science museum, and that allows visitors to explore large sets of data on two 3D globe maps. We present and discuss design strategies and optimization that we implemented to mitigate two sets of design challenges: (1) Dealing with display, interaction, and affordance blindness; and, (2) Supporting multiple functionalities and collaboration.