Data Materialisation: A New Undergraduate Course for a Data Driven Society

Traditionally, data has been presented in textual format and the interaction with the user confined to the keyboard or touch screen to input data and the screen to deliver information. However, with the advent of a data-driven society, an opportunity for more natural and efficient ways of presenting data and interacting with it has emerged. Although the area of Human-Computer Interaction has existed for a long time, its focus has always been on the interaction with an artefact (the computer). Today instead, we face the challenge of interacting with an intangible object: data. As a result, a key requirement emerges: How do we make legible the enormous amounts of data produced per day to ordinary people? Designers, able to devise natural and smooth interaction experiences, should play a relevant role in this new scenario. However, they might lack the basic technical knowledge required to understand the possibilities of these new systems. In this paper we present a brief how-to manual for an undergraduate course on data materialisation: the process of transforming an intangible object (data) in an artefact that can be interacted with in a physical way.