Revealing the Power Dynamics of Collaborative Sense-Making Supported by Participatory Data Physicalization

While it is proven that the individual construction of a data physicalization aids personal sense-making, little is known about how sense-making is negotiated when it is shared by multiple, co-located participants. Since participatory data physicalization can inadvertently prioritize dominant views, we interpreted data feminism principles to design a collaborative physicalization construction process that empowers stakeholders and participants to co-determine how meanings are represented. This process revealed how the interplay of physical and non-physical actions during construction negotiations supported collaborative sense-making among 14 groups of 55 participants during 4 workshops, enabling us to articulate how explicit power is embodied by the physicalization artifact and negotiated between authoring and collaborating participants, and facilitators; whereas tacit power operates through artifact meanings, participant identity and design decisions. By providing one operationalization of data-feminist critique into the form of design requirements, our contributions support the design of more equitable physicalization and visualization construction methods.