The insights and information from World Information Architecture Day, as mentioned in the previous post, extended my view on interactions in the context of my work. There was a missing part which explains why it is necessary to have an interactive component, manifested digitally or spatially, in the project in order to enhance or extend the perception and understanding of the given data set. The lecture by Karl Fast with the topic of epistemic interactions provided this missing part. So my main work for this week was embedding the notes from Fasts talk, as well as researching about the topic and formulating this part as a draft. To get a more profound insight into the topic, I got in contact with Fast. This helped me to gain more precise information as well as references which can be used in my thesis. 

Epistemic actions are actions and gestures people make while thinking. These actions can range from sketching to prototyping or, citing the example from my thesis by Maglio and Kirsh, trying out different possibilities how a zoid can fit while playing Tetris. Refering to my project, these actions can be implemented as subtle interactions which help the viewer to reasonate about the topic and the data set and thus, helps to provide a more profound understanding.

Another milestone in the whole process was the thesis structure workshop which clarified crucial last questions, such as how intense a literature review has to be in a bachelor thesis. This workshop was followed by an intense mentoring with Björn, in which we discussed the implementation of the topic of reenactment and materialwise considerations based on my theoretical findings. Another important outcome was to give an outlook of these possible discussions in part A but introduce and discuss this topics in part B. Interesting lecture Björn recommended to back up the topic of epistemic interactions was «Metaphors we live by» by Lakoff and Johnsen, as metaphors can be another form of epistemic interactions.

Also in this week, I prepared and conducted a survey to interview people from three different fields (design, researchers, ordinary people) about their background and the resulting perception of data visualization. Other questions were what they associate with time and birth and also, which interactions they think of when hearing these terms. The answers to these questions should provide a general understanding of how the given topics are perceived and with which metaphors people work in order to understand these topics. Therefore, these statements can be taken as a base to start from and to built a concept for the spatial installation from.

A second part of the questionnaire gives 3 examples of visualizations and asks if the survey participants could get the content, in which amount of time they managed to do so and what could have been done better. These are crucial informations for a digital visualization.