Bar Chart on Visualizing.JP

90% for Range and Peak, 50% for Order: CairnFORM's Ring Chart

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0900

CairnFORM is a cylindrical physical chart that shows the hourly amount of renewable energy as the diameters of stacked rings. It has 10 rings, and each ring stands for one hour from 8:00 to 17:59. In December 2017, a test was held at a public event where 90 visitors read the chart. The question asking for the hours with generation (range) was answered correctly by 93.3%, and the question asking for the time of the peak by 92.2%. The question asking visitors to put the hours in order of quantity was answered correctly by 52.2%.

It was made by Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, and Nadine Couture of ESTIA and LaBRI (University of Bordeaux) in Bidart, France. It is a prototype from Daniel’s doctoral research (2016–2018), and the dataphys.org list carries it as a 2018 work. Below I read it in the order it was made, following the author version of the main paper (TEI 2019), the long French paper (JIPS, 2020 issue), and the lab’s project page.

A vertical bar chart, rotated around its axis

The starting point was not saving energy but “shifting when electricity is used.” In JIPS, the authors write that they aim to get people at work to use electricity when renewable energy is plentiful. The means is the habit of shifting when to charge a laptop’s battery. When they asked in the lab, 15 of the 18 people who use laptops kept them plugged in almost all the time (JIPS 2.1).

To shift charging, people at work need to know when the day’s renewable peak will be. The authors considered shared spaces as the place to put a display. The TEI 2018 paper says that in a vertical bar chart, the bars in front hide the ones behind, so you cannot read it without walking around it, and goes on:

“train stations, public places, airports, roundabouts are public spaces where people are in a hurry and do not have time to change their point of view.”

The point is that in stations, squares, airports, and intersections people are in a hurry and have no time to change their viewpoint.

So the authors built, as a physical object, a vertical bar chart rotated around its axis. This is how TEI 2019 puts it:

“We designed CairnFORM as an illuminated and dynamic vertical bar chart with cylindrical symmetry that allows 360˚-readability.”

It is a glowing, moving vertical bar chart, and its cylindrical symmetry lets it be read from 360°. The “ring chart” of the title is not a doughnut-shaped pie chart. It is a vertical bar chart in which each bar has become a ring. The name comes from the cairn, a pile of stacked stones (TEI 2018).

The hard part was the ring itself. Electronics sit inside it, it must stay round while expanding, and its diameter must grow to about twice its size. A Hoberman-type mechanism turns into a star shape midway, and the Weather Lamp, which uses six arcs, left gaps between the arcs. The authors went through prototypes with four arms and four arcs, four arms and eight arcs, and eight arms and eight arcs, and added lighting to the last design (TEI 2018, JIPS 5.1).

Photo of four ring-mechanism prototypes, from the contracted state to the expanded state. The one at the right end is the finished form, glowing blue

Source: Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture (ESTIA) / tangible.estia.fr, “CairnFORM” project page

The finished device has 10 rings and is 105 cm tall (TEI 2019). Each ring weighs 2.3 kg, and its diameter expands from 35 cm to 62 cm. The arcs are transparent PMMA (acrylic). The cost of materials was about 2,350 euros.

PATSTEC, a catalog of scientific and technical heritage, gives the diameter as “30–60 cm,” which differs from the papers. The later study by Bouzekri & Rivière (2026) gives the height of the chart part of the revised version as 92.5 cm. This can be read as 105 cm being the height of the whole device and 92.5 cm the height of the span where the rings are lined up.

One ring is one hour, and the diameter is the renewable amount

TEI 2019 describes the correspondence between rings and quantity this way:

“a fully retracted ring with light off represents a 0 W availability and a fully expanded ring with full blue brightness represents a max W availability.”

The most contracted, unlit ring stands for 0 W, and the most expanded ring at full blue brightness stands for the upper limit of generation capacity (max W). Diameter and brightness redundantly encode the same quantity.

Data	Physical property	How it is mapped / values
Time (8:00–17:59, one hour at a time)	Ring position in the stack	10 rings = 10 hours. 8:00 at the bottom, 17:00 at the top
Average renewable amount for that hour	Ring diameter	0 W = 35 cm, max W = 62 cm (a width of 1.8 times)
The same amount (redundant encoding)	Brightness	0 W = off, max W = maximum blue brightness
Range shown	Cut-out of time	One daily peak (valley → peak → valley) shown at a time, in sequence
The arrival of the next peak	Motion of the rings expanding and contracting	Animated over 6 seconds
Hue	Does not represent data	Changed from blue to green after the public test
What the data is	Wooden tree model on top and the words “Renewable Energy”	Added as a removable legend

Source: TEI 2019, JIPS (5.2, 6.1, 7.9.1).

There were two reasons for the one-hour step (JIPS 3.4.4). A time window such as “unplug from 15:00 to 16:00” is easier to remember as an instruction. And generation forecasts are more reliable as hourly averages than at minute resolution.

Another rule is not to show a whole day’s peaks at once. In a test with printed paper charts, with 3 groups of 7 people, when all the peaks were drawn together, most people could find only the highest peak (TEI 2019). When the peaks were shown one at a time in sequence, they found all the peaks.

Three photos of a glowing blue ring taken from directly above. The diameter grows from left to right

Source: Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture (ESTIA) / tangible.estia.fr, “CairnFORM” project page

December 2017, Biarritz: 90 people read it

On December 1–2, 2017, the authors set up the 10-ring version at a public event, the “24h de l’innovation,” in Biarritz (JIPS chapter 7). They gathered 90 visitors who stopped by and divided them into 3 groups of 30. What they showed was neither measured nor forecast data but synthetic data built so that the smallest difference in diameter was 1 cm (JIPS 7.3). The peak lengths were 3 hours (V3h), 6 hours (V6h), and 9 hours (V9h), one per group.

There were three questions. Name the hours with generation (range). Name the time of the peak (compare). Put the hours in order from smallest to largest quantity (order). The results are in Table 3 of TEI 2019.

Peak shown	Range	Peak	Order
V3h (3 hours)	100%	93.3%	80.0%
V6h (6 hours)	93.3%	93.3%	63.3%
V9h (9 hours)	86.6%	90.0%	13.3%
Average	93.3%	92.2%	52.2%

Accuracy for range and peak was around 90% regardless of the peak length (p = .12, p = .85). Accuracy for order fell as the peak got longer (p = .001). The authors hypothesize that this is due to the limit on how much information people can handle at once (Miller, 1956). It is because one has to compare values many times before and after the peak and keep them in mind.

“physical bar charts and physical ring charts (i.e., physical vertical bar charts with cylindrical symmetry) seem better suited to range tasks and compare tasks, rather than order tasks.”

This is the summary from TEI 2019: physical bar charts, and the ring charts that turn them into cylinders, seem suited to range and compare tasks, not to order tasks.

The test also led to a redesign. One visitor thought it was a clock, and another thought it was a countdown to the end of the event (JIPS 7.8). Some said green would suit renewable energy better than blue. The authors changed the rings to green and put a wooden tree model and the words “Renewable Energy” on top.

Six photo frames. In the three on the left, the color is changing from blue to green and there is no tree model; in the three on the right, a tree model and a “RENEWABLE ENERGY” legend sit on top, with labels from 8H to 17H

Source: Maxime Daniel / dataphys.org, “CairnFORM: a Physical Ring Chart Showing Renewable Energy Data”

The redundant encoding with brightness did not work well. 9 of the 90 people said they could not tell the differences in brightness. Light spilled between the overlapping transparent arcs and made the whole thing too bright (TEI 2019).

Five people also said the differences in diameter were hard to see. The sources disagree on the step value: JIPS gives the smallest diameter difference as 1 cm (30 levels), while TEI 2019 says “the radius granularity was 9 mm.” Since 27 cm divided by 30 is about 0.9 cm, “radius” can be read as meaning the diameter step. JIPS writes that it was later made coarser, to 2 cm (15 levels).

On the UEQ-S, the hedonic quality scored 2.25 and the pragmatic quality 1.67 (on a scale of −3 to 3). The body text of TEI 2019 has the labels “excellent” and “good” the opposite way from JIPS, and judging by the order of the scores, JIPS can be read as correct.

Noticing an expanding ring at the edge of vision

Next is the workplace. The authors tested in the lab whether a person working at a desk could notice the movement of a ring at the edge of their vision (TEI 2019). There were 30 participants and a single ring, placed about 2.6 m away at a 45° angle.

Every movement took 6 seconds, and three ways of varying the speed were compared. The share of people who noticed the movement while concentrating on another task was highest for the exponential type, which starts slowly and accelerates, at 72.2%; constant speed gave 60.5%, and the logarithmic type, which starts fast and decelerates, gave 66.5% (TEI 2019). The results section of JIPS writes 129/167 = 77.2%, and the conclusion gives 72.2%. Either way, the exponential type has the highest value.

After that, a two-month test was run in actual workplaces. However, all I could check is the abstract of a short TEI ‘21 paper.

“Six participants had to shift energy consumption by using energy storage. To do so, they were notified about local energy forecasts. Compared with flat-screen animations, early results show that cylindrical shape-change animations keep a better attractiveness over time.”

Six people used energy storage to shift their consumption and were notified of local energy forecasts. These are early results: compared with flat-screen animations, the cylindrical shape-change animations kept their attractiveness better over time.

The summaries differ between sources. The abstract of the doctoral thesis says “as practical as, and more hedonic than” the flat screen. The project page says that in an 8-week experiment both qualities were above the screen. I have not seen the full text, and I have not checked which is accurate.

How did third parties see this work?

Bae et al. (CHI 2022), in a paper on a design space for physicalization that classifies 47 works, take up CairnFORM.

“Two such examples include Bookly [45] and CairnFORM [13] which both encode data using volume. … studies in visualization show that people have trouble reasoning over changes in volume and are better at reasoning over other visual variables such as surface area”

CairnFORM is given as an example of encoding by volume, and the point is that people are better at reading changes in area than in volume. The authors themselves write “diameter (and brightness),” so there is a mismatch in classification. It can be read that which perceptual findings apply depends on whether the ring is read as the size of a circle or as the swelling of a solid.

Bouzekri & Rivière (2026) compared a revised CairnFORM with PlantFORM, a plant-shaped device made of paper and wood, and with a screen version (28 people). It is a follow-up study by the co-author Rivière, so it is not a fully independent evaluation. Across the six questions asking for charging and discharging times, CairnFORM’s accuracy was highest at 96% (the difference from the screen version CairnSCREEN’s 94% was not significant, p=.187), and 54% of people also chose it as “most innovative.” On the other hand, one participant pointed out a mismatch between the material and the theme.

“We are talking about renewable energy; it affects me enormously, so all this Plexiglass [of CairnFORM] […], if we are in renewable energy, we must go all the way in the product we offer.”

The opinion is that if the subject is renewable energy, the product should go all the way, not be this mass of acrylic.

PATSTEC (a program preserving France’s contemporary scientific and technical heritage) has registered CairnFORM in its catalog as an object worth keeping. It notes that the prototype is now at ESTIA.

Uses

The first is to decide the form from the place where it will stand. The cylinder was a form for places with many people who have no time to walk around, so that the bars do not hide each other. Writing out first from which directions people come and how long they stop can narrow down the candidate forms, it seems.

The second is to choose the display from the question you want answered. Only 13.3% could put the 9-hour peak in order of size. For “when should I charge,” being able to read the peak is enough, and conveying a ranking as well would need something like numeric labels, it seems.

The third is to reduce the amount shown at once. When peaks were shown one at a time, even small peaks were not overlooked. In a physical chart with a limited number of rings, switching in sequence may suit the question better.

The fourth is that the material breaks the encoding. Brightness became hard to tell apart because light spilled over, and a glowing, moving cylinder was mistaken for a clock. For a physical chart, the design needs to include the behavior of the material and the cues for “what the data is.”

References

Primary sources

dataphys.org, “CairnFORM: a Physical Ring Chart Showing Renewable Energy Data” (registered by Maxime Daniel, 2019-06-05): https://dataphys.org/list/cairnform-a-physical-ring-chart-showing-renewable-energy-data/ (tag list: https://dataphys.org/list/tags/self-actuated/ )
Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture, “CairnFORM: a Shape-Changing Ring Chart Notifying Renewable Energy Availability in Peripheral Locations,” TEI ‘19, pp. 275–286, 2019. Author version: https://tangible.estia.fr/prototypes/cairnform/pub/papers/cairnform-peripheral_tei2019.pdf / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3295634 / HAL: https://hal.science/hal-01976793
Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture, “Designing an Expandable Illuminated Ring to Build an Actuated Ring Chart,” TEI 2018 Work in Progress, 2018. Author version: https://tangible.estia.fr/prototypes/cairnform/pub/papers/illuminated-ring_tei18_wip.pdf / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173294
Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture, “CairnFORM,” IHM 2018 Démonstrations, 2018: https://tangible.estia.fr/prototypes/cairnform/pub/papers/cairnform-demonstration_IHM2018.pdf (HAL: https://hal.science/hal-01900064 )
Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, Nadine Couture, “Un histogramme cylindrique à changement de forme pour afficher des prévisions de disponibilité de l’énergie,” Journal d’Interaction Personne-Système, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2020: https://jips.episciences.org/articles/7102 (PDF: https://jips.episciences.org/en/articles/7102/download / DOI: https://doi.org/10.46298/jips.7102 )
ESTIA, CairnFORM project page: https://tangible.estia.fr/prototypes/cairnform/
Maxime Daniel, CairnFORM (control software, GPL-3.0): https://github.com/maximedaniel/CairnFORM
Maxime Daniel, “CairnFORM: a Shape-Changing Ring Chart Notifying Renewable Energy Availability” (YouTube): https://youtu.be/wZ_3CtDllbA
Checked for the abstract only
- Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, “Exploring Axisymmetric Shape-Change’s Purposes and Allure for Ambient Display,” TEI ‘21 Work in Progress, 2021: https://hal.science/hal-03040877
- Maxime Daniel, doctoral thesis “Afficheurs cylindriques à changement de forme,” Université de Bordeaux, 2018: https://theses.hal.science/tel-02371620
- IHM 2017 Travaux en cours (CAIRNS): https://hal.science/hal-01578006
- ETIS 2017: https://hal.science/hal-01685710

Secondary sources

S. Sandra Bae et al., “Making Data Tangible: A Cross-disciplinary Design Space for Data Physicalization,” CHI 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.10520
Élodie Bouzekri, Guillaume Rivière, “Shaping Plant-Like Shape-Changing Interfaces as Vertical Charts,” arXiv, 2026 (follow-up study by co-author Rivière): https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15902
PATSTEC, CairnFORM (Fiche N° 4104): https://www.patstec.fr/ressources/objets/detail?id=35997
(Mentioned by name only) Zhang, Ilić, Signer, arXiv, 2025: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06583

Showing Web Activity with Four Bars That Rise and Fall on a Table: Wable

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0900

Wable was a prototype table that showed activity on web services through the height of bars that raise and lower automatically. There are four bars, and they move up and down according to activity on services such as Plazes, Flickr and Last.fm. The activity is pulled in through RSS feeds. According to infosthetics, the display can be configured in a web application. It was made by Physical Interaction Lab, built in 2007 and made public in February 2008.

The project’s official page no longer loads. What follows relies on the text of the official site as quoted by the data physicalization catalog dataphys.org and others, on the press coverage of February 2008 (infosthetics, Core77, Engadget, GeekAlerts), and on the research paper “Physecology” (2022). I have found no source that describes the mechanism, the dimensions, or the scale of the bars. This article does not go into those either.

February 2008: reported as a bar chart in a coffee table

The first to report on it was the visualization blog information aesthetics (infosthetics). Its article of February 1, 2008, filed under “aesthetic / physical”, introduced it in one sentence:

“a physical bar graph integrated in a coffee table, which visualizes the changes of one’s web identity over time, & creates a physical link between your virtual & real identity.”

Summary: a physical bar graph built into a coffee table that shows how one’s web identity changes over time and physically links the virtual and real identities.

On the same day, the design magazine Core77 covered it as a coffee-table piece, “via infosthetics”. On February 2, Engadget ran a post “Via Core77”, and GeekAlerts also published an article.

Photo of four prisms in green, purple, blue and orange standing at different heights on a black tabletop

Source: Physical Interaction Lab / GeekAlerts, “Wable – Cool Interactive Table”

In the photo, the green bar is the tallest and the blue one the shortest.

The year it was made is 2007 according to dataphys.org. The same photo is also reproduced on EduTech Wiki (University of Geneva) as “Wable, version 1 prototype”. The EXIF data of that image file records a digitization date of November 7, 2007 and a file modification date of December 30, 2007. It can be read as consistent with the press dates if the table was photographed and built between autumn and the end of 2007 and made public in early February 2008.

The makers’ words: change over time, and a physical link

The makers’ own text was on the official site of Physical Interaction Lab. Four sources (dataphys.org, Core77, GeekAlerts and EduTech Wiki) quote the same passage.

“The personal feeds from webapplications like Plazes, Flickr, and Last.fm tell much about the activity of an individual on the internet. In this project we aim to explore how you can visualize the changes of your web identity over time and create a physical link between your virtual and real identity. The interface consists of both a physical table and a web application. This direct feedback from your web identity is customizable and can be connected to any RSS feed.”

Summary: Personal feeds from web applications such as Plazes, Flickr and Last.fm say a lot about what a person does online. The project explores how to show the changes of a web identity over time and how to link the virtual and real identities physically. The interface has two parts, a physical table and a web application. The display is customizable and can be connected to any RSS feed.

Plazes was a location-sharing service of the time, Flickr a photo service, and Last.fm a service for music listening history. Two aims are stated. One is to show how activity on the web changes over time. The other is to link the virtual and real identities physically.

The official site also carried a note:

“Update: What you see is the first prototype version of Wable. We are currently building version 2 so keep an eye on our blog or sign up below to find out when it’s released and ready for sale.”

Summary: What you see is the first prototype of Wable. Version 2 is being built, and the blog or the sign-up form will announce when it is released and ready for sale.

What was shown publicly was the first prototype. Version 2 was under construction, with a sale in view. I have found no source saying whether version 2 ever appeared.

Little is known about the makers. dataphys.org gives the source as “Physical Interaction Lab (2007). Wable.” and quotes the official text as “From the company’s website”, so it treats the Lab as a company. The video “Wable” on YouTube was uploaded by David Kjelkerud. The paper Physecology also lists the work in its references as “David Kjelkerud. 2007. Wable.” What role he had in the Lab, who else was involved, and where the Lab was located are not known.

The official page (physicalinteractionlab.com/projects/wable) no longer loads. In a 2018 update, GeekAlerts added a note that it had removed the link because the page was no longer public.

What was mapped to which bar

The correspondence between data and appearance is summarized in a table.

Data	Appearance / material	What is known	What is not known
A person’s web services	Number and arrangement of bars. I read one bar as corresponding to one service	There are four bars (Engadget). The services named are Plazes, Flickr and Last.fm (official text)	Which service each of the four bars stands for
Activity on each service	Height of the bar. It rises and falls automatically with the data	“raise and lower automatically based on the activity” (Engadget). Physecology gives it as an example of countable data (online activity)	The scale of the heights, units, maximum, update interval
Color of the bars	Material color, which does not change	Physecology gives it as an example of “fixed optical properties, such as material color”. In the photo: green, purple, blue and orange	Whether color was used to tell the series apart is not known. I read it as distinguishing the series. The mapping between colors and services is also unknown
Time	A slider. Past activity is seen through the bars	“explore personal online activity over time through a slider button” (Physecology)	The position of the slider, how far back it could go
Data source and settings	A web application (screen)	Can be connected to any RSS feed (official text). infosthetics writes “a customizable web application”	What the settings screen contained, how feeds are assigned to bars

dataphys.org classifies this work as an “Active physical visualization”. Its tags are extruded 2d, online community data, personal information management, pragmatic and self-actuated. Extruded 2d means a two-dimensional chart extruded in the height direction, and self-actuated means that the device moves by itself.

A small component is visible at the front right of the tabletop in the photo. No source says whether it is the slider.

Video thumbnail showing four prisms in purple, green, orange and blue standing on a table in front of a window

Source: David Kjelkerud / YouTube, “Wable” (video thumbnail)

In the video thumbnail, four prisms stand on a table in front of a window. The shooting angle and the combination of heights differ from the photo above, and the blue bar looks clearly taller than in the photo above. The difference in heights between the two images can be read as consistent with the reports that the bars move up and down. The video is available on the YouTube page for “Wable”.

From here on, these are my own readings. In that quantity is shown by length (height) and series by position and color, the encoding can be read as a textbook bar chart. Making it physical adds two things. The bars move by themselves, so change over time is seen as motion. And the bars sit inside a piece of furniture, so they catch the eye without opening a screen, as I read it.

How third parties saw this table

Contemporary press, blog readers and later research each looked at a different aspect.

Darren Murph of Engadget kept his distance in his article of February 2, 2008. The headline, “Wable graphically represents web activity, ain’t much of a table”, means that it is not much of a table.

“This unique “table,” as it were, sports four bars that raise and lower automatically based on the activity from web applications such as Plazes, Flickr and Last.fm. Beyond that, it doesn’t seem to add too much more value to one’s life, but if it’s the simple things that keep you smiling, check out a remarkably unremarkable video of it after the jump.”

Summary: This “table” has four bars that rise and fall automatically with activity from Plazes, Flickr and Last.fm. It does not seem to add much value to one’s life, but if simple things make you smile, watch the remarkably unremarkable video.

In the opening of the article, he writes that he is not sure anyone really wants what the makers advertise, a physical link between the virtual and real identities.

The infosthetics article has three reader comments. The first says “Wow. Beautiful.” and points out that the music in the video is by Kraftwerk. The next comment is negative:

“Ugh … ridiculous … too BIG … I mean, where are you going to put it?”

Summary: Too big. Where would you even put it?

The third comment is a rebuttal to this one. Readers’ opinions are not expert evaluations, but they can be read as showing that making the chart physical raised questions a screen visualization does not face: its size and where to put it.

On the research side, the paper “Physecology” by Kim Sauvé, Miriam Sturdee and Steven Houben (ACM TOCHI, 2022) discusses Wable. The paper analyzes 60 physicalization examples, and Wable is third in its list. For data type, it gives “Wable [56] (online activity)” as an example of countable data. For data subject, it is an example of personal data. It cites color as an example of the fixed color of a material rather than of a dynamic display. For interaction, it gives the following as an example of exploring data:

“Example physicalizations are Wable [56] in which you can explore personal online activity over time through a slider button”

Summary: An example physicalization is Wable, in which personal online activity can be explored over time with a slider button.

What the press saw as a “moving table”, this paper organizes along design dimensions: the relations among data type, interaction, and input and output.

There is one more early record. The paper “Embodiment in data sculpture” by Jack Zhao and Andrew Vande Moere (DIMEA 2008) cites the official Wable page in its references, with an access date of May 2008. I have not been able to confirm how the body of the paper treats it, but it means that within a few months of its release, Wable was in the references of a paper on data sculpture.

Takeaways for practice

I read three things from this work that can be carried back into visualization work.

Separate the data source from the display. Wable’s entry point is RSS feeds, and the official text says it can be connected to any feed. infosthetics writes that the display can be configured in a web application (“a customizable web application”). I read it as a design in which the thing displayed stays four bars while its content can be swapped.
Treat how readable the mapping is as separate from how new the work is. A mapping that shows quantity by height is understood at a glance. Yet Engadget called the video “remarkably unremarkable”. If you make a bar chart physical, I read it that the value has to lie in the motion and the placement, not in a novel encoding.
Treat placement as part of the design. For a screen visualization, size is settled inside the screen. A bar chart on a table takes up space in a room. The infosthetics reader’s “where are you going to put it?” can be read as showing that, in physicalization, where to put it is itself in question.

References

Primary sources

Physical Interaction Lab, “Wable” official page (link dead): http://www.physicalinteractionlab.com/projects/wable / Wayback Machine snapshot (2019-06-09): http://web.archive.org/web/20190609053241/http://www.physicalinteractionlab.com/projects/wable
Pierre Dragicevic, Yvonne Jansen, “2007 – Wable: Web Behavior Shown with a Dynamic Bar Chart”, List of Physical Visualizations (quotes the official site’s text): https://dataphys.org/list/wable-visualize-web-behavior-as-a-physical-bar-chart/
David Kjelkerud, “Wable”, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6G5YlICVRg (uploader confirmed at: https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6G5YlICVRg&format=json )

Secondary sources

Darren Murph, “Wable graphically represents web activity, ain’t much of a table”, Engadget, 2008-02-02: https://www.engadget.com/2008-02-02-wable-graphically-represents-web-activity-aint-much-of-a-table.html
infosthetics, “physical bar graph table”, information aesthetics, 2008-02-01 (includes the statement “the Wable interface consists of both a physical table & a customizable web application” and three reader comments): https://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/02/physical_bar_graph_table_visualization.html
squirrelbait, “Wable physical web activity visualization table”, Core77, 2008-02-01: https://www.core77.com/posts/8843/Wable-physical-web-activity-visualization-table
Robert Birming, “Wable – Cool Interactive Table”, GeekAlerts, 2008-02-02 (updated 2018): https://www.geekalerts.com/wable-cool-interactive-table/
Kim Sauvé, Miriam Sturdee, Steven Houben, “Physecology: A Conceptual Framework to describe Data Physicalizations in their Real-World Context”, ACM TOCHI 29(3), 2022: https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/161277/1/TOCHI_Physecology.pdf (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3505590 )
Jack Zhao, Andrew Vande Moere, “Embodiment in data sculpture: a model of the physical visualization of information”, DIMEA 2008: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1413634.1413696 (the citation of Wable was confirmed in Crossref’s reference data: https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1145/1413634.1413696 )
EduTech Wiki, “Physical visualization”: https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Physical_visualization / image file page: https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/File:Wable.jpg

White Beads for Satisfied, Red for Unsatisfied: The Bar Chart in the Antell Cafeteria at the University of Helsinki

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0900

At the exit of an Antell cafeteria on the University of Helsinki campus, there was a physical bar chart. Customers put in a white bead (satisfied) or a red bead (unsatisfied).

The source is the entry “Physical Customer Satisfaction Survey” on dataphys.org (List of Physical Visualizations), a site that collects physical visualizations. Pierre Dragicevic added it in March 2015. The text is two sentences long, and the photo is a single image taken by Luana Micallef. This article follows those two sentences and the photo.

What stood on the table by the exit

The text of the entry reads as follows.

Participatory physical bar charts at the exit of the Antell cafeteria at the University of Helsinki. White beads represent statisfied customers, red beads are unsatisfied ones.

In short: participatory physical bar charts at the exit of the Antell cafeteria at the University of Helsinki, where white beads stand for satisfied customers and red beads for unsatisfied ones. “statisfied” is the spelling in the original.

The Source field says “Antell”, and the link goes to Antell’s home page. It contains no description of the device. Since the Source field names Antell, the device can be read as belonging to the Antell outlet rather than being run by the university. Micallef, who took the photo, was in 2015 a visualization researcher affiliated with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).

On the table at the exit stand a slender glass tube with white beads collected at the bottom, a square glass bowl holding white and red beads, a card showing a smiling face and a frowning face, and a box for Antell’s customer survey

Photo by Luana Micallef / From dataphys.org

Here is what appears in the photo, starting from the front.

There are two square glass bowls: the left one holds white beads, the right one red beads.
On the card in the transparent stand behind them, a white smiling face and a red frowning face sit side by side under the Antell logo.
On the left stands a slender glass tube, with white beads collected at the bottom.
The sign behind the tube poses a question in Finnish and English. Part of it is hidden by the tube, but the English can be read as “How did we serve you today?”
At the back is a white box labeled “ASIAKASPALAUTE”, and a stack of paper lies at the front left.

The two faces on the card can be read as a legend for the bead colors. The two bowls in front can be read as the place where customers pick up their beads. Only one tube appears in the photo, and the beads in it are all white. The text says “bar charts” in the plural, but the photo does not show where any other tubes were.

What was mapped to color and height

The table below lays out the mapping between data and physical properties, together with the basis for each.

Data	Physical property	Basis
Customer’s rating (satisfied / unsatisfied)	Bead color (white / red)	Stated in the text
Meaning of the colors	The card’s white smiling face and red frowning face	Visible in the photo
Who answers	Customers put in the beads themselves	“Participatory” in the text
When they answer	Placement (the cafeteria exit)	Stated in the text
Number of responses	Height of the beads piled in the tube	Read from “bar charts” in the text and the tube in the photo
One respondent	One bead	Not described in the source

The only mapping stated in the text is color. Reading counts from height comes from the name “bar chart” and from the tube in the photo. The source does not say how many beads one person puts in, or what the bars were divided by. The installation period, the number of beads collected, the ratio of satisfied to unsatisfied, and who designed the device are also unknown from the source.

dataphys classifies this device as a Passive physical visualization, a category of physical visualizations that use no power or electronic components. The only thing that updates the display can be read as the hands of the customers dropping in beads.

dataphys lists it alongside devices of the same kind

The entry’s Related field lists three other works alongside this device.

Related: Also see similar contraptions by Hans Haacke (1970), Lucy Kimbell (2006), and Jennifer Payne (2014).

It is a single sentence asking readers to also see similar contraptions by Haacke (1970), Kimbell (2006), and Payne (2014). The Related field calls the three “similar contraptions”, which suggests that dataphys lists this case as the same kind. This device can be read as a tool the outlet set out for a customer survey (the source does not describe its purpose).

The entry also carries the participatory tag. The tag page begins with voting by pebbles in ancient Greece and says this.

The earliest participatory visualizations were probably voting systems.

In short: the earliest participatory visualizations were probably voting systems. Here is how the dataphys entries divide up the answers.

Device	Year	How answers are divided
Pebble voting (ancient Greece)	—	Pebble color (white = for, black = against). Sometimes two urns were used
Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll	1970	Position of the box (left box = Yes, right box = No)
Lucy Kimbell, Physical Bar Charts	2006	Badges are taken out, so the more votes, the lower the bar
Jennifer Payne, Physical Visual Sedimentation	2014	Gumball color separates groups within the university
Antell’s device	2015 (year of registration)	Bead color (white = satisfied, red = unsatisfied)

Haacke’s MoMA Poll divided yes and no by the position of the box (article). Antell’s device, like pebble voting, divides answers by color. Dividing by color suggests that the position of the bar could be assigned to something else. However, what this device divided by position cannot be confirmed.

dataphys’s treatment is a classification, not an evaluation. I could not find any criticism or press coverage of this device itself in a form I could read.

How it could be used

In this device, the act of answering and the act of showing the result happen on the same tube. The next customer walking out can also see the beads that have piled up so far, it can be read.

In this photo, the card with the smiling and frowning faces can be read as a legend. It can be read as a design that makes the meaning of white and red clear without reading any text.

The materials in the photo are beads, glass bowls and a tube, a sign, and a card. There are no electronic components. A device of this kind can be read as easy to assemble from materials at hand.

The source does not describe any tallying or record-keeping for this device. MoMA Poll kept the final day’s vote count with a photoelectric counter (article). As a general point, when collecting on a physical object, it helps later to decide in advance how the counts will be taken and recorded.

References

Primary sources

dataphys.org “2015 – Physical Customer Satisfaction Survey” (Added by Pierre Dragicevic, registered 2015-03-12): https://dataphys.org/list/physical-customer-satisfaction-survey/
Photo (Photo by Luana Micallef): https://dataphys.org/list/images/uploads/2015/03/antell.jpg
Antell (the link target of the entry’s Source field; it contains no description of the device): http://www.antell.fi/
The photographer’s 2015 affiliation (HIIT): https://research.aalto.fi/en/activities/creating-high-quality-figures-for-your-publications/

Comparison and background sources (related pages on dataphys.org; these are not evaluations of this device itself)

dataphys.org participatory tag: https://dataphys.org/list/tags/participatory/
dataphys.org Passive physical visualization category: https://dataphys.org/list/categories/passive-physical-visualization/
dataphys.org Pebble Voting: https://dataphys.org/list/visualizing-opinions-with-pebbles/
dataphys.org MoMA Poll (Haacke, 1970): https://dataphys.org/list/moma-poll-haackes-participatory-bar-chart/
dataphys.org Inverted Participatory Bar Charts (Kimbell): https://dataphys.org/list/physical-bar-charts/
dataphys.org Physical Visual Sedimentation (Payne, 2014): https://dataphys.org/list/physical-visual-sedimentation/