DataChopin: A collaborative interface for data visualisation and composition on large interactive screens

DataChopin is a research prototype that explores the democratisation of data analytics and sensemaking capabilities. The collaborative interface is a major outcome of sustained research efforts at the Urban Informatics Research Lab, part of the QUT Design Lab, in citizen science and public engagement with urban data. It was developed over the course of multiple iterations spanning across three use cases. Its distinctive characteristics are the use of large, interactive displays as a shared desktop, as well as flexible composition mechanisms for incremental construction of visualisations. By studying interfaces for composing data and visual forms, this research contributes to the understanding of the fundamental components and structure of visualisations, resulting in a general and flexible compositional model. This lays the groundwork for data exploration tools that allow non-expert users to mix, match, and manipulate datasets to obtain visual representations requiring little to no programming knowledge.