Fostering comparisons: Designing an interactive exhibit that visualizes marine animal behaviors

We share our challenges and lessons learned in designing our exhibit prototype that encourages museum visitors to learn about marine animal behaviors through interactive visualization and data exploration. Our intent is to have visitors draw comparisons between animal behaviors, similarly to how scientists would, to make insights and discoveries. In our efforts, we have designed a set of visual encodings around the Tagging of Pelagic Predator (TOPP) data set to create the appropriate abstractions of this rich and complex field data. We have incorporated Multiple External Representations (MERs) and tangible user interfaces (TUIs) to provide a complementary representation of the data and promote self-learning. Through the formative evaluation, we can identify a few strengths and weaknesses of our prototype design. Our evaluation results suggest that we are progressing in the right direction - we observed the public making some comparisons and inferences - but still require further design iterations to improve our visualization exhibit.