Data Physicalization 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

A Century of Search Terms as the Height of Ten Moving Bars: Centograph

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

Centograph is a moving bar graph made in 2009 by the London studio Tinker. It shows the relative number of Google News Archive articles that mention a search term, as the height of ten moving bars. Each bar is assigned to one of the ten decades from 1909 to 2009.

The client was St Paul’s School for Boys in London. The work was made for the school’s 500th anniversary celebration and was later installed permanently in its Computing Department. What follows draws on the Tinker London project page, the description of the video Tinker posted on Vimeo, and the description of the Flickr album. All of them are short texts, and I could not find any technical documentation that explains how the work operates.

May 2009, at the 500th-anniversary Open Day

The Tinker London project page gives the date of the work as “May 2009” and the client as “St Paul’s School for Boys”. The collaborator is Ben Burry, credited with web programming. No individual designer is named. In the Vimeo description, the maker is given as “Tinker.it!”.

The school was founded in 1509, so 2009 was its 500th anniversary (Wikipedia). The project page states the purpose of the work as follows.

Centograph is a kinetic bar graph that was developed for the 500th anniversary celebration of St. Paul’s School for Boys. It was designed to encourage users to reflect on possible connections between new and emerging technologies and other academic and social disciplines.

In short, it is a moving bar graph made for the school’s 500th-anniversary celebration, designed to get users thinking about connections between new technologies and other academic and social fields.

According to the Flickr album description, the commission was for the 500th-anniversary “Open Day”.

A black box-shaped Centograph in a room. Year labels line its front, a laptop sits on a desk beside it, and two people stand in front

Source: Tinker.it! (Flickr: tinker_it) / Tinker London, “Centograph” project page

The Flickr photo was taken between May 20 and 25, 2009. The Vimeo video (49 seconds) was posted on June 2, 2009. The project page says “Centograph is now a permanent fixture in St Paul’s School for Boys Computing Department.”, so the work was installed at the school permanently.

Type a search term, and ten bars rise and fall

The project page describes how it works as follows.

When users enter a search term on an online interface, Google News Archive is queried for related news articles from the past 100 years and returns a histogram of articles sorted according to date. That graph is then made physical by pushing and pulling the bars on the graph.

When a term is entered, Google News Archive is queried for related articles from the past 100 years, and what comes back is a histogram of the articles sorted by date. That graph is then made physical by pushing and pulling the bars.

The Vimeo description is clearer about what the height of a bar means.

The bars on the graph then change height to display a histogram of the relative number of news articles for each decade.

The bars change height to show a histogram of the “relative number” of news articles for each decade. The Flickr photo description says how many years one bar covers.

Each bar represents a decade from 1909 to 2009.

Each bar represents one decade between 1909 and 2009. The number of bars is given as “Ten” in the dataphys.org introduction (quoted in the section on third-party views).

On the front of a black base, year labels such as 1929 and 1939 are lined up, and plank-like bars stand on top of the base

Source: Tinker London, “Centograph” project page

Taken together with the opening photo, labels with the years 1919, 1929 and 1939, ten years apart, line the front of the base (from 1949 on, the labels cannot be read in the photos). The Flickr description says “from 1909”, but the leftmost label legible in the photos is 1919. The sources do not say whether a label’s year marks the start or the end of its decade.

Plank-like bars lit in red rise from slits in a black base

Source: Tinker London, “Centograph” project page

The bars come up through slits cut in the base. You can see them move in Tinker’s Vimeo video.

The correspondence between data and object that the sources let us establish is summarized below.

Data	Property of the object	Description	Source
Decades (1909 to 2009, ten years each)	The row of bars; one bar = one decade	“Each bar represents a decade from 1909 to 2009.” The count is “Ten” in dataphys.org	Flickr, dataphys.org
The relative number of news articles related to the search term in that decade	Height of the bar	“the relative number of news articles for each decade”	Vimeo
Switching the search term	Up-and-down movement of the same ten bars	“pushing and pulling the bars”, “moving the bars up and down”	Tinker London, Flickr
The whole period	The row of ten bars as a whole	“over the past 100 years”	Tinker London, Vimeo
Marker for each decade	Year labels on the front of the base	1919, 1929, 1939 (1949 onward cannot be read in the photos)	Photos of the work
Input	A search screen separate from the object; Twitter	“an online interface”, “twitter enabled”	Tinker London, Flickr

Some things are not in the sources. They do not say how the relative number was calculated, which value was mapped to the maximum height, what range the bar heights cover, or how the bars are moved. Because the normalization is unknown, you cannot read the article count back from the height of a bar.

Terms also arrive from Twitter

The place where search terms are entered was separate from the object. The Vimeo description says “When you enter a search term into the computer”, and dataphys.org says “A separate search interface is provided on a regular desktop computer”. In the opening photo, too, a laptop sits on a desk beside the base.

The Flickr photo description mentions another way in.

Physical web and twitter enabled bar graph that looks up the frequency of keywords on Google News Archives and displays them by moving the bars up and down.

It is a physical bar graph connected to the web and Twitter, which looks up how often keywords appear in Google News Archive and shows the result by moving the bars up and down.

The screen of the centograph account on Twitter. Short posts such as thomas, st paul’s, 2nd world war and great war are listed

Source: Tinker London, “Centograph” project page

A screenshot on the project page shows a Twitter account named centograph. Its location is “St Paul’s School, London”, and its bio is the same as the Flickr sentence above. The posts include terms such as “thomas”, “nicholas”, “st paul’s”, “2nd world war”, “great war” and “pineapple”, all posted from Twitter4J on the evening of May 23.

The sources do not say whether these posts are terms that reached the work from Twitter, or a record of terms the work had received. Nor do they say who entered these terms, or on what occasion.

Not the numbers, but the “shape” of a century

The project page and the Vimeo description contain almost the same sentence.

This allows users to view the ‘shape’ of the past century in relation to different key words—from progression in computing technology to times of war and peace to changing sources of energy.

Users can view the “shape” of the past century for different keywords, from progress in computing technology, to times of war and peace, to changing sources of energy.

All three subjects the makers name are terms whose article counts would probably vary a great deal from decade to decade. Centograph can be read as a tool conceived less for reading off numbers than for comparing where each term’s peaks and valleys fall among the decades. The ten decades along the horizontal axis stay fixed, and only the heights change. Tinker writes the height as a “relative number” and names what it wants viewers to see as the “shape”. This suggests a design that put comparing shapes ahead of letting viewers read exact counts.

The data source, Google News Archive, is a newspaper-archive search that opened in September 2006. A blog post in Information World Review at the time introduced one of its features this way.

Another striking innovation is a Show Timeline option, which categorises results according to their publication dates.

The archive had a feature called “Show Timeline” that sorted search results by publication date. The project page’s “returns a histogram of articles sorted according to date” can also be read as describing counts received per decade in this way. Centograph can be read as moving the on-screen timeline into the height of bars. That said, it has not been confirmed that the work used this feature.

The sources also do not say why the period was set at the 100 years from 1909 to 2009. It can be read as fitting the framing of looking back on “the past century” at a 500th-anniversary celebration.

How third parties saw the work

The researcher Pierre Dragicevic has listed this work in the List of Physical Visualizations on dataphys.org. It is categorized as “Active physical visualization”, with the tags bar charts, news and temporal data. The description reads as follows.

Ten actuated bar charts that show the popularity of keywords of interest in news articles over time, made by the company Tinker from London.

It introduces the work as ten moving bar charts showing how the popularity of keywords changes in news articles over time. It differs from the primary sources in two points, however. Tinker writes “a physical bar graph”, a single bar graph with ten bars. And Tinker’s own words are “frequency” and “relative number of news articles”; it does not use “popularity”. dataphys cites an infosthetics article (August 2009) as its source, but I have not been able to check its text.

A student blog from Carnegie Mellon University’s course 15-104 (Fall 2017) draws attention to where the work is placed.

By turning data from something esoteric into something tangible and cool, it helps to incite a level of interest in the areas of computation and data visualization, especially in students.

The evaluation is that turning obscure data into something touchable raises interest in computation and data visualization, especially among students. The author counts it as a strength that the work is a permanent installation made for an educational setting. Since this is a student assignment, it is weak as an expert assessment. Still, the factual part, bars every ten years starting in 1909, agrees with the primary sources.

I found no newspaper or magazine coverage. The 2009 press items listed on Tinker London’s Press page do not mention Centograph either.

What to take from it

The first thing to take from this work is fixing the axis and swapping only the heights. The bars are always assigned to the same decades. Because the row does not change when the term changes, viewers can compare differences in shape.

Second is separating input from display. Search terms come in from a separate screen or from Twitter, and what moves on the object’s side is the height of ten bars. Each time a viewer tries a term, the same object becomes a different graph.

Last is the lifespan of a physicalization that relies on web data. According to Wikipedia, Google announced in 2011 that it would stop adding material to News Archive. Whether the work keeps running in the same form as back then has not been confirmed. For a work whose data source lies outside it, you need to consider what happens after the source stops being updated, as I read it.

References

Primary sources

Tinker London, “Centograph” project page: https://tinkerlondon.com/what-we-do-centograph.html
Tinker, “Centograph” (Vimeo, 2009-06-02, 49 seconds): https://vimeo.com/4961482 (description and metadata: https://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=https://vimeo.com/4961482 )
Tinker.it!, “Centograph (work)” (Flickr album): https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinker_it/sets/72157618662102020/
Tinker.it!, “Centograph” (Flickr photo): https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinker_it/3555602327/
Tinker London, “Press”: https://tinkerlondon.com/press.html

Secondary sources

dataphys.org, “2009 – Centograph: Dynamic Bar Charts Show Keyword Popularity” (listed by Pierre Dragicevic): https://dataphys.org/list/centograph-dynamic-bar-charts-show-keyword-popularity/
mmiller5, “Looking Outwards-07” (Carnegie Mellon University 15-104, Fall 2017): https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2017/index.html%3Fp=17742.html
infosthetics, “centograph: physical bar graph” (August 2009; text not checked): http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/08/centograph_physical_bar_graph.html

Background sources

Information World Review, “Historic perspectives in Google News” (2006-09-11): https://informationworldreview.blogspot.com/2006/09/historic-perspectives-in-google-news.html
Wikipedia, “Google News Archive”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News_Archive
Wikipedia, “St Paul’s School, London”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_School,_London

Easter Tables Become Turning Disks, Layers of the Body Become Lifting Paper: Movable Books of the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

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

The 13th-century English monk Matthew Paris turned a circular table for finding the date of Easter into a disk that rotates on a metal pin at its center. Single-sheet anatomical prints made in Strasbourg and Augsburg from 1538 showed the layers of the body, from skin to spine, through stacked paper flaps that the reader lifts one by one. The turning mechanism is called a volvelle, and the lifting mechanism a flap.

The entry point is the item “1200 – Pop-Up and Movable Books” on dataphys.org, the timeline of data physicalization. This article follows it back to the records of the holding libraries: manuscript MS 26 at the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and an anatomical sheet of 1544 held by the Wellcome Collection. In the second half, we also look at Johann Remmelin’s anatomy book of 1619, as an example of the lifting mechanism entering the bound book.

In the Front Matter of the Chronica Majora, a Table Turns

Matthew Paris (c. 1200–59) was a Benedictine monk of St Albans Abbey and a chronicler. The Parker Library’s description introduces him as follows.

“Matthew was also a talented artist who was both scribe and illustrator of his own chronicles.”

That is, he was a man who handled both the copying and the illustrations of his own chronicles. His major work, the Chronica Majora, is a manuscript in two volumes: volume I is Parker Library MS 26, and volume II is MS 16. It was made c. 1240–55. MS 26 covers the period from the Creation to 1188.

The turning table is in the front matter of this MS 26. The front matter holds, among other things, an itinerary map from London to Jerusalem (seven pages), a royal genealogy, a diagram of the winds, and a calendar. M. R. James’s catalogue lists f. v recto as a “Circular Paschal table”, that is, a circular Easter table, and describes the mechanism like this.

“On f. vr the circular Paschal table is made to revolve: head of metal pin in C.”

The circular Easter table is made to revolve, and the head of a metal pin sits at its center. The catalogue also says that another table or diagram that was once pasted at the bottom of the page is now lost.

On the back, f. v verso, there is a table that does not turn. The catalogue gives it the title “Table of Concurrentes etc. from 1116 to 1620”. Concurrentes are numbers used to determine the day of the week for each year. A static table lists 505 years, from 1116 to 1620. The front side has a turning disk, and the back side has a static table.

The date of Easter is found by a calculation called computus. Gianfranco Crupi explains that this calculation rests on the 19-year cycle of the Moon across solar years. As for the number of concentric rings in the disk and what is written on each ring, I could not confirm them from textual primary sources. The material of the disk is not confirmed either.

The image of f. vr can be seen on Parker Library on the Web (CC BY-NC 4.0).

1538: Stacking the Body on a Single Sheet

Anatomical illustrations with lifting flaps began not in books but as single sheets. Andrea Carlino calls this kind of print an anatomical fugitive sheet, and catalogued them in Paper Bodies (1999), which covers 1538 to 1687. The first edition dates from 1538. Heinrich Vogtherr in Strasbourg and Jost de Negker in Augsburg issued their sheets in the same year. Between 1538 and 1545, at least twenty editions appeared.

The one we look at here is the 1544 edition held by the Wellcome Collection, Anathomia oder abconterfettung eynes Mans leib, wie er inwendig gestaltet ist. It is paired with a sheet showing a woman. It was printed by Jacob Frölich of Strasbourg. It is a woodcut measuring 55 × 25 cm, and the Wellcome copy is hand-colored.

A single-sheet print of a man, 1544 edition. Around a seated man, small drawings of the stomach, liver, lungs and other organs and German text are arranged in three tiers

Source: Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark) / Wellcome Collection, Anathomia oder abconterfettung eynes Mans leib… (1544)

According to Carlino, when Vogtherr left Strasbourg in 1544, he seems to have left the woodblocks of the sheet with Frölich. Frölich printed from those blocks in the same year and added color. Carlino writes that the color softened the “austerity” of the image.

According to the Wellcome record, flaps are pasted over the chest and abdomen of the seated male and female figures: six on the man and nine on the woman. Each time a flap is lifted, the anatomical structure appears one layer deeper. Carlino describes how this genre is built. The whole torso lifts as a single flap. The internal organs are printed on separate paper, cut out, and pasted in layers. The last layer is the back of the rib cage and the spinal cord.

The torso of the man in the 1544 edition, arranged in order from Wellcome images 1 to 7. From the layers of lungs, heart and stomach, ribs and spine appear at the far right

Source: Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark) / Wellcome Collection, Anathomia oder abconterfettung eynes Mans leib… (1544); the torso area is cropped from images 1–7 and placed side by side

The figure above arranges Wellcome’s images 1 to 7 of the male figure from left to right. Along the way, the same layer appears twice. In the second image, PULMO (lung), COR (heart), DIAFRAGMA (diaphragm), STOMACHUS (stomach) and SPLEN (spleen) are printed over the organs. At the far right, the ribs and spine appear.

According to Carlino, in Vogtherr’s edition the name of each organ is printed on top of it, mainly in Latin. Some organs are printed once more in the surrounding text, where they come with a German name and a short explanation. The male and female figures were printed from the same blocks, and only the head and the flaps for the chest and the genitals were swapped. Carlino reads this as a way of keeping costs down.

In 1539, Vogtherr also issued, from the same blocks, a small booklet of easy anatomy in German. From this, Carlino concludes that the readers were neither specialists nor scholars.

From a Single Sheet to a Book of About 120 Flaps

The lifting mechanism eventually entered the book. Carlino writes that Andreas Vesalius used this technique in the Epitome (1543) and the Fabrica, which included figures for the reader to cut out and paste together.

The work that lies beyond them is Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum (Mirror of the Microcosm). It was published in Augsburg in 1619. It is a folio 47 cm high, and its anatomical figures are three, on pp. 9, 15 and 21. The plates were engraved on copper by Lucas Kilian after Remmelin’s own drawings. The flaps on the three figures number about 120, according to the bibliographic record of the Getty Research Institute copy.

of Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum. A copper engraving with standing male and female figures, a torso in the center, and small drawings of eyes, ears and organs around them

Source: Getty Research Institute (shown as NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT on the Internet Archive) / Internet Archive, Catoptrum microcosmicum (1619)

The figure above is the first figure on p. 9, “Visio prima”, and it bears the signature “L. K. sculptor” at lower left. McGill University Library explains the order of the layers as “surface → blood vessels → muscles → nerves → spine”. The organs of the ears, eyes and torso are divided into separate small figures. In Visio prima, the last layer of the female torso in the center shows a fetus in the womb.

The year of publication is disputed. McGill calls the 1619 edition the “first authorized edition”, while Columbia University gives 1613 for the first Latin edition. Columbia writes that it was a bestseller of its day, aimed at “curious laypeople rather than medical students or physicians”. The book was translated into German, Dutch, English and French.

What Was Mapped to Which Movement

The table below sums up how the data corresponds to the properties of paper.

Source	Data (what it represents)	Mapping to a physical property	Sources
Paris’s Easter table (MS 26, f. vr)	The calculation for finding the date of Easter, based on the 19-year lunar cycle	A circular table made into a disk that turns on a metal pin at its center	James’s catalogue, Crupi 2019
Same (f. vv)	Concurrentes for determining the day of the week (1116–1620)	Laid out as a static table on the back	James’s catalogue
1544 single sheet	The order of the organs of the chest and abdomen, from front to back	The order in which the paper is stacked. Six flaps on the man, nine on the woman. The last layer is the back of the rib cage and the spinal cord	Wellcome, Carlino 1999
Same	Names of organs	Printed over each organ in Latin. German names and explanations in the text	Carlino 1999
Same	Difference between male and female	The same blocks are used, and only the head and the flaps for the chest and the genitals are swapped	Carlino 1999
Remmelin 1619	Layers of the body	Stacked in the order surface → blood vessels → muscles → nerves → spine. About 120 flaps across three figures	McGill 2019, Getty bibliographic record

With a static circular table, the reader had to rotate the manuscript to read the numbers. The ArchBook site summarizes this point from the research of Daniel K. Connolly as follows.

“required the reader to reorient the manuscript in order to read the numbers. Matthew Paris’s innovation allowed readers to turn the disk and align it with their bodies”

In other words, Paris’s innovation let the reader turn the disk and align it with their own body.

Looking at the table, the turning mechanism can be read as a calculator that looks up the correspondence between periodic quantities by rotation angle, and the lifting mechanism as a hierarchical display that shows spatial order through overlap. In the language of visualization, the former can be read as a circular layout with a means for the reader to manipulate its alignment, and the latter as the paper version of drill-down (a display that opens detail step by step).

Note that the body text of the dataphys entry contains points that do not agree with the holding libraries’ records.

The title is given as “Chronica Majorca”, but the correct form is Chronica Majora (maiora).
The axis of rotation is given as a string or rivet, but the MS 26 catalogue says it is a metal pin.
It says movable books began to be used for entertainment and for children in the 19th century, but ArchBook cites a volvelle for a fortune-telling lottery game from 1546.

How Third Parties Saw These Mechanisms

The first is Crupi, who focuses on the reader’s hand. In his paper “Volvelles of knowledge” (2019), he writes of Paris’s disk as follows.

“transformed the reader’s manual gesture into an intellectual experience of knowledge, thus enabling them to become not merely the interpreter of the text but also its architect, whose intervention enables the algorithm that generates meaning.”

This is an assessment that the reader’s hand movement became an experience of knowledge, and that the reader became not merely an interpreter of the text but a designer who sets in motion the procedure that produces meaning. Crupi also places the volvelle and the flap as the two devices most widely used in the scientific books of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The second is Carlino, who focuses on how the procedure of dissection was transferred to paper.

“This technique of illustration provided a virtual three-dimensional representation … In short, it translated on to paper the whole concept of anatomical dissection, mimicking the progressive unveiling of the body, from skin to guts.”

This is an assessment that the technique gave a virtual three-dimensional representation, and carried over onto paper the whole idea of dissection, in which the body is opened step by step from skin to innards. Carlino also touches on the commercial side, writing that the success of the single sheets was “immeasurably greater” than that of any anatomical treatise.

The third is Connolly, cited in the previous section. His view is that Paris’s disk solved the trouble of rotating the manuscript. ArchBook introduces this disk as “the first known volvelle”, and Crupi calls it “one of the earliest”.

Valeria Finucci, who curated the Duke University exhibition, says of such books in Duke Today:

“They allow for a material reading of their medical content.”

In other words, they make it possible to read medical content as a physical object.

Uses

From these two mechanisms, three things can be read as worth taking back to visualization work.

The first is to choose a way of moving that fits the shape of the data. Paris’s table was a calculation on a periodic calendar, and the mechanism was rotation. The anatomical sheet was an order from front to back, and the mechanism was stacked paper that lifts. When deciding on interaction on a screen too, checking first whether the data is periodic or hierarchical narrows the kinds of operation, so it can be read.

The second is to make the number and order of layers the number and order of operations. The 1544 male figure has six flaps stacked, and the last layer is said to be the back of the rib cage and the spinal cord. The number and order of lifts can be read as corresponding to the order of depth in the body. When designing a drill-down, make it predictable to the reader how many times they must open to reach the deepest level. The paper anatomical sheet can be read as an example of this.

The third is to place names and explanations separately. Over the organs, mainly Latin names were printed, and for some organs the text gave a German name and a short explanation. Keep the annotations inside the figure short, and leave the explanation to the surrounding text. This can be read as the same idea as how annotations are divided in charts today.

Both mechanisms show nothing unless the reader moves their hands. In works of data physicalization, deciding what to make the reader’s hands do is itself part of the encoding. The movable books of the medieval and early modern eras can be read as showing exactly that.

References

Primary sources

dataphys.org, “1200 – Pop-Up and Movable Books” (Added by Pierre Dragicevic, sent by Benjamin Bach). https://dataphys.org/list/pop-up-and-movable-books/
Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 26 (Matthew Paris, Chronica maiora I), IIIF manifest (description and license). https://dms-data.stanford.edu/data/manifests/Parker/rf352tc5448/manifest.json
Parker Library on the Web, MS 26. https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/rf352tc5448
M. R. James’s description of the contents of MS 26 (via Biblissima IIIF Collections). https://iiif.biblissima.fr/collections/manifest/82acae38b80a68174ccdf8d7ca902548f7c32f36
Wellcome Collection, Anathomia oder abconterfettung eynes Mans leib, wie er inwendig gestaltet ist., Strassburg: Jacob Frölich, 1544. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/w2mgwvb3 / IIIF https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/presentation/v2/b33552964
Wellcome Collection, Anatomical fugitive sheets, c. 1540. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/anmb7n8h
Andrea Carlino, Paper Bodies, Catalogue (Cat. 1 = Vogtherr 1538). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300073129
Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum, Augsburg, 1619 (Getty Research Institute). https://archive.org/details/gri_33125015238948
Same (McGill University Library, Osler Library). https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-osl_elf_cum-deo-johannis-remmelini_elfWZ250R388c1619-19996
Same, German edition of 1661, Kleiner welt Spiegel (Columbia University Libraries). https://archive.org/details/ldpd_11497246_000
Ruoshan Gu & Mary Hague-Yearl, “A Mirror into the Microcosm: Digitizing Johann Remmelin’s 1619 Flap Anatomy,” McGill Library Matters, 2019-12-17. https://news.library.mcgill.ca/a-mirror-into-the-microcosm-digitizing-johann-remmelins-1619-flap-anatomy-catoptrum-microcosmicum/
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, “A Medical Pop-Up Book From the 17th Century.” https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/medical-pop-book-17th-century
Duke University Libraries, “Animated Anatomies” (2011). https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/anatomy/intro / list of exhibited items https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/anatomy/intro/bib

Secondary sources

Gianfranco Crupi, “Volvelles of knowledge,” JLIS.it 10(2), 2019. doi:10.4403/jlis.it-12534. https://iris.uniroma1.it/handle/11573/1269189
Andrea Carlino, Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets 1538–1687, Medical History Supplement 19, 1999, ch. 2 “Anatomical Fugitive Sheets.” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300073099
Gravelle, Mustapha, Leroux, “Volvelles,” ArchBook (2012, revised 2022; includes a summary of Daniel K. Connolly, Art Bulletin 1999). https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/volvelles.php
Duke Today, 2011-04-07 (remarks by Valeria Finucci). https://today.duke.edu/2011/04/flapbook.html
Laughing Squid (E.D.W. Lynch), “Animated Anatomies, An Exhibition of Antique Medical Pop-Up Books,” 2011-05-18. https://laughingsquid.com/animated-anatomies-an-exhibition-of-antique-medical-pop-up-books/
Wikipedia, “Chronica Majora.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronica_Majora / “Matthew Paris.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Paris

Hollow or Solid Stems Sorted the Votes, and a Counting Board Laid Them Out: Voting Tokens in Athenian Courts

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

In the Athenian courts of the 4th century BC, bronze voting tokens separated plaintiff from defendant by whether the stem was hollow or solid. At the count, the tokens were set into a reckoning-board and rearranged into a form that was “visible and easy to count.” This procedure appears in chapters 68–69 of The Constitution of the Athenians (Athenaion Politeia), attributed to Aristotle (or his school).

The case-collection site dataphys.org lists it as “500 BC – Pebble Voting.” But this is not the work of a single author: it is an entry that bundles together 5th-century BC vase painting and courts, 4th-century BC courts, and the ballot boxes of modern societies. The dataphys.org description, “a white pebble meant yes and a black pebble meant no,” cannot be found in The Constitution of the Athenians, in Boegehold, in the Getty’s commentary, or in the Agora records. What follows reads the sources one by one, following The Constitution of the Athenians, the records of the objects excavated in the Agora, the cup in the Getty Museum, and the 1963 paper by Alan L. Boegehold.

A Cup with Two Mounds of Pebbles

The oldest source is a red-figure kylix (wine cup), 86.AE.286, in the J. Paul Getty Museum. It was made in Athens, is attributed to the Brygos Painter, and dates to around 490 BC. One side of the exterior shows the quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus; the other shows the Greek leaders voting with stones.

Part of the cup’s exterior. Mounds of small dots are drawn to the left and right of a pedestal, and the figure at the far right holds his head in his hands

Source: J. Paul Getty Museum (86.AE.286), from Getty, “Voting with the Ancient Greeks”

The number of pebbles on Ajax’s side, at right, falls short of the more politically savvy Odysseus’s by one, causing Ajax to grasp his head in despair.

The Getty’s commentary takes the dots on either side of the pedestal to be two mounds of stones, one for Odysseus and one for Ajax. The mound on the right, Ajax’s, is one short, and Ajax clutches his head. One pebble was one vote; which mound it sat in stood for the candidate, and the size of the mound stood for the number of votes.

Boegehold saw the distinctive feature of such scenes in the fact that pebbles are used and yet no secrecy is kept at all. The pebbles are simply “counting stones,” which can be counted slowly and accurately after everyone has voted, an advantage that shouts and show of hands do not have. This is his reading. He also writes, however, that it would be rash to claim that the painter copied the procedure of the time in every detail.

In the 5th-century BC courts, a juror held a single pebble (or shell) and put it into one of two urns, one for the plaintiff and one for the defendant (Boegehold; Getty). The vote was distinguished by position: which urn it went into. The contents of the urn were emptied onto a board and counted.

Hiding the Stem Hole Under the Fingers

In the 4th century BC, the voting tokens used in the courts changed into bronze discs. Boegehold dates the court described in The Constitution of the Athenians to “around 325 B.C.” The description is in chapter 68 (Kenyon translation).

The ballot balls are made of brass with stems running through the centre, half of them having the stem pierced and the other half solid.

A stem runs through the center; half of the tokens have a stem with a hole through it, hollow, and the other half have a solid stem. Hollow meant a vote for the plaintiff, solid a vote for the defendant.

Seven bronze voting tokens, each a disc with a stem at its center. Only the one at upper left has a hole through the center of its stem

Source: Marsyas (Wikimedia Commons contributor), Ancient Agora Museum of Athens, from Wikimedia Commons, “AGMA Jetons vote.jpg” (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Actual specimens have come out of the Agora in Athens. In the excavation records, B 728 is hollow with a diameter of 0.063 m, and B 1055 is solid with a diameter of 0.065 m. B 1055 bears the inscription “ΨΗΦΟΣ ΔΗΜΟΣΙΑ” on its face. According to Boegehold, all the published tokens are dated to the 4th century BC on the basis of letter forms.

A photograph of five bronze voting tokens laid side by side. The one in the middle has a hole in its stem, and in the two lying on their sides the stems project from both sides of the disc

Photo: Craig Mauzy. Source: American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations, “Agora Image 2007.10.0080” (© ASCSA)

The photograph shows, from left, B 1056, B 146, B 728, B 1058, and B 1055. The discs look almost the same; only the inside of the stem differs.

the juror, taking his two ballot balls from the stand, with his hand closed over the stem so as not to show either the pierced or the solid ballot to the litigants, casts the one which is to count into the brazen urn, and the other into the wooden urn.

The procedure is this: the juror receives two tokens and, keeping the stem covered by his hand so that the litigants see nothing, drops the one that is to count into the bronze urn and the other into the wooden urn. The hole in the lid of the bronze urn admitted only one token, so that no one could put in two (Rackham translation).

dataphys.org describes these tokens as ones “whose difference could only be felt by touch.” The center of the design can be read as making the tokens look alike and hiding the difference under the fingers. Because both tokens always go into one urn or the other, the hand’s movement does not reveal the choice either, which can also be read from the procedure.

Setting the Tokens into a Counting Board and Laying Them Out

The counting procedure is in chapter 69 (Rackham translation).

empty it out on to a reckoning-board with as many holes in it as there are pebbles, in order that they may be set out visibly and be easy to count, and that the perforated and the whole ones may be clearly seen by the litigants.

The contents of the bronze urn are emptied onto a reckoning-board with as many holes as there are tokens. The explanation is that this lets them be set out clearly and counted easily, and lets the litigants clearly see the hollow ones and the solid ones.

According to Boegehold, on the board the stem is pushed into a hole and keeps the disc from falling. He calls this “a second function” of the tokens’ peculiar shape. The stem is the place that hides the type of vote at the time of voting, and at the count it becomes the foot that stands the token on the board.

The counting was done by jurors chosen by lot. A herald announced the totals; the side with more votes won, and a tie went to the defendant. Penalties were decided by the same method, with a second vote in which hollow stood for the plaintiff’s proposal and solid for the defendant’s. The number of jurors was normally 201, 401, or 501 (Boegehold). If several hundred tokens are sorted into hollow and solid and stood in the holes, the two totals can be compared by the lengths of the rows; this is a reading.

The table below summarizes, source by source, how data corresponds to the properties of objects.

Scene (source)	Data	Property of the object	How it is read
Cup of around 490 BC (Getty)	Votes per candidate	Position (which mound) and size of the mound	Compare the two mounds
5th-century BC courts (Boegehold, Getty)	Plaintiff or defendant	Position (which urn)	Empty onto a board and count
4th-century BC courts, voting (ch. 68)	Plaintiff or defendant	Shape (stem hollow or solid), hidden by the fingers	The counted token goes into the bronze urn
4th-century BC courts, counting (ch. 69)	Number of plaintiff and defendant votes	Arrangement stood in the holes of the counting board	Sort, lay out, and announce the totals
Metamorphoses, book 15	Guilty or not guilty	Color (white = not guilty, black = guilty)	Empty the urn and count
Society ballot boxes (Mackey)	Admit or not	Color (white ball = yes, black ball or black cube = no)	Whether even one black is present
RPSL ballot box (late 19th century)	Yes or no	Position (left and right drawers); black balls only	Open the drawers and count

In the 4th-century BC courts, the difference in shape is hidden at the vote and laid out in view at the count. This can be read as a design that switches the encoding of the same vote to a different way of showing at each stage.

White Pebbles and Black Balls Come from Other Sources

Ovid’s White and Black Pebbles

The dataphys.org entry says “a white pebble meant “yes” and a black pebble meant “no”.” But a description of telling votes apart by color appears in none of The Constitution of the Athenians, Boegehold, the Getty’s commentary, or the Agora records.

White and black pebbles appear in Roman-era Latin poetry, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 15.

Mos erat antiquus niveis atrisque lapillis, / his damnare reos, illis absolvere culpa

The line says that there was an old custom of using white and black pebbles, black to condemn the accused and white to acquit. It comes from the story of the trial of Myscelus of Argos, in which a black stone in the urn is changed to white by divine power. The meaning is “guilty / not guilty,” not “yes / no.” The explanation in circulation seems closer to something a Roman poem told as an old custom of Argos; this is a reading.

Furthermore, votes in the Assembly were normally taken by show of hands (χειροτονία) (Carbon et al.). Pebble voting was not voting in general.

A Society’s Box Is Checked for “Clear” or “Foul,” Not Counted

Voting by putting white and black balls into a box belongs to later societies and clubs. The Encyclopedia Masonica, which carries the text of Mackey’s encyclopedia, writes that lodges voted with white and black balls, and that some Grand Lodges also admitted black cubes. The box was divided into two compartments, and its opening was built so that the hand could not be seen.

At the count, the Senior Deacon shows the box to the Junior Warden, the Senior Warden, and the Master in that order, and each reports either “the box is clear” or “the box is foul.” If there is no black at all it is clear; if there is even one it is foul. What is read is not the number of votes but whether any black is mixed in. Regulation VI of the General Regulations in the 1723 edition of the Constitutions of the Free-Masons provides that no one is to be admitted without the unanimous consent of the members present, but does not specify balls or a box.

A wooden ballot box with YES and NO on top, a large round hole on the front, and the letters Y and N on the drawers below

Source: Photo by Philafrenzy, Royal Philatelic Society London collection, from Wikimedia Commons, “Royal Philatelic Society London committee voting box 1880s” (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The box of the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) from the late 19th century was used to elect committee members. According to the Society’s description, a Victorian box normally had one drawer into which white (yes) or black (no) balls were put, to be counted later. This box uses only black balls, and the vote is divided by whether the ball is dropped into the left or the right drawer. The opening is large enough to admit a hand up to the wrist.

A receiving slot on top of a red wooden box, a compartment holding white balls, and a drawer pulled out at the front

Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History (exhibition “Vote: The Machinery of Democracy”), from Wikimedia Commons, “Ballotboxballs.jpg” (public domain)

dataphys.org writes that when the box was opened, everyone could see the result at once. In Mackey’s procedure, the box is viewed by three officers and the result is conveyed orally. When the white-and-black-ball box began is also something that the sources used here could not establish.

How Third Parties Have Seen This Voting

Boegehold’s 1963 paper placed the pebble first as a tool for counting, before it was a tool for secrecy.

the men who first conceived of polling an assembly needed to have an accurate count before the more sophisticated notion of perverting the count occurred to them.

His conclusion is that the people who first thought of taking a vote needed an accurate count before the more elaborate idea of corruption occurred to them. He also notes that the 5th-century BC “two urns and one pebble” and the 4th-century BC “two tokens and two urns” have been confused.

The 2026 paper by Carbon, Isager, and Pedersen states that accurate vote counts seem to have come only from secret ballots in which the votes were counted. The Assembly normally voted by show of hands, and cases in which vote counts survive in inscriptions are few, mostly from the Hellenistic period onward. To the view that the pebble was a “countable vote,” they add a limit on the settings in which it was used.

Annelisa Stephan of the Getty introduced the cup in a 2012 article as “one of the earliest depictions of voting in art.” She also notes that the pebble, psephos, is the root of psephology (the study of elections), and that ballot comes from the medieval French ballotte (a small ball).

Uses

The first is assigning a single vote a different way of showing at each stage. What was needed at the time of voting was secrecy, and the discs looked the same. What was needed at the time of counting was an appearance that the litigants could accept, and the same discs were stood on a board and laid out. This can be read as an example of changing the property used between input and display.

The second is choosing the form to suit the task of reading. The counting board is an arrangement for comparing two numbers, and the society’s box is built to judge “is even one black present?” In data physicalization too, deciding first what the viewer is to judge makes it easier to decide whether to use color, position, or shape.

The third is checking where a well-known explanation comes from. “White means yes, black means no” seems to be told in a way that overlaps not with Athenian sources but with a Roman poem (guilty / not guilty) and with the white and black balls of later societies. Writing about an old case by separating which period and which source it comes from keeps one from mixing up the correspondence between the properties of objects and their meanings.

References

Primary sources

Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, ch. 68 (Rackham translation, Perseus): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0046%3Achapter%3D68
Same, ch. 69 (Rackham translation, Perseus): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0046%3Achapter%3D69
Same (Kenyon translation, MIT Internet Classics Archive): https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/athenian_const.mb.txt
American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Agora Excavations, B 728: https://agora.ascsa.net/id/agora/object/b%20728
Same, B 1055: https://agora.ascsa.net/id/agora/object/b%201055
Same, Agora Image 2007.10.0080 (photo by Craig Mauzy): https://agora.ascsa.net/id/agora/image/2007.10.0080
J. Paul Getty Museum, “Wine Cup with the Suicide of Ajax” (86.AE.286, Google Arts & Culture): https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/wine-cup-with-the-suicide-of-ajax/tAEB2kodFlg3DA?hl=en (object page: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103W7A )
Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 15 (Latin, Perseus): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0029%3Abook%3D15%3Acard%3D1 (English translation: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D15%3Acard%3D1 )
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, 1723 edition, General Regulations VI (full text): https://distantreader.org/stacks/trust/uc2/uc2_ark+=13960=t6ww7bd0n.txt
Encyclopedia Masonica (text of Mackey’s encyclopedia), “Ballot”: https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/en/entry/ballot
Same, “Ballot-box”: https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/en/entry/ballot-box
Royal Philatelic Society London, “The Ballot Box”: https://www.rpsl.org.uk/Museum/Explore/U3A-Project/emodule/798/egallery/28
dataphys.org, “500 BC – Pebble Voting” (added by Pierre Dragicevic): https://dataphys.org/list/visualizing-opinions-with-pebbles/
Wikimedia Commons, “AGMA Jetons vote.jpg” (Marsyas (contributor), CC BY-SA 2.5): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AGMA_Jetons_vote.jpg
Wikimedia Commons, “Royal Philatelic Society London committee voting box 1880s.jpg” (Philafrenzy, CC BY-SA 4.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Philatelic_Society_London_committee_voting_box_1880s.jpg
Wikimedia Commons, “Ballotboxballs.jpg” (public domain): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballotboxballs.jpg

Secondary sources

Alan L. Boegehold, “Toward a Study of Athenian Voting Procedure,” Hesperia 32(4), 1963, pp. 366–374: https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/uploads/media/hesperia/147360.pdf
Jan-Mathieu Carbon, Signe Isager, Poul Pedersen, “Vote Counts, Quorum, and Unanimous Decisions at Halikarnassos,” C&M Supplementum 4, 2026, pp. 177–201: https://tidsskrift.dk/classicaetmediaevalia/article/download/169641/210370/380240
Annelisa Stephan, “Voting with the Ancient Greeks,” Getty, 2012-11-06: https://www.getty.edu/news/voting-with-the-ancient-greeks/
Wikipedia, “Blackballing” (as a supplement): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackballing

One IKEA Box for a Billion People: Hans Rosling's Physical Visualizations

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

On June 21, 2010, at TED@Cannes in Cannes, Hans Rosling represented the world’s population with boxes, using the rule “one IKEA box = one billion people.” He lined the boxes up horizontally along levels of income and moved them by hand as the years advanced: 1960, 2010, 2050. In the second half of the same talk, from 6:08, he switched to an animated bubble chart on the screen.

The source is the transcript of the talk “Global population growth, box by box” (9 min 47 s), published by TED. dataphys.org, a catalog of physical visualizations collected by researchers, treats this talk as the starting point and gathers the later talks and videos in which Rosling used physical objects into a single entry. The entry was submitted by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen. Below, I follow the 2010 talk in chronological order and cover the later examples only to the extent they could be confirmed.

June 2010: IKEA boxes on the stage in Cannes

Rosling was a Swedish physician, a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute, and a co-founder of Gapminder. According to dataphys, the technology and staging of the talk were handled by his son, Ola Rosling.

The 2010 talk begins with a joke.

I’m going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I’ve done during my first five TEDTalks. Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box.

The preamble: he used digital technology in his first five TED talks, but today he will use a “new analog teaching technology” he found at IKEA, namely this box.

He then says, “This box contains one billion people,” and recreates the world of 1960 as he heard about it from a schoolteacher. The developed countries hold one billion people and the developing countries two billion. Families in the developed countries save up to buy a Volvo; families in the developing countries save for the day’s food and for a single pair of shoes. What a family wants to get becomes the marker for where a box is placed.

Rosling in front of a screen reading 2010, speaking beside a pile of yellow-green boxes and a blue box, with miniature sandals, a car, and an airplane

Source: TED, “Global population growth, box by box”

Moving the boxes from 1960 to 2050

A box’s horizontal position is a level of living. Small objects mark the levels: shoes, a bicycle, a car, an airplane. infosthetics (July 2010) describes these as “miniature icons of living conditions.”

Advancing to 2010, there are seven boxes, because four billion people were added in 50 years. The West’s one billion moves to the airplane position. The developing countries that have grown move to the car position. The biggest pile is the three billion at the bicycle position. And at the shoe position, two billion people remain, about as poor as they were 50 years earlier. Rosling says:

But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying – there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle.

In short: the world is continuous from walking through biking and driving to flying, and most people are somewhere in the middle.

He moves the boxes for the 2050 outlook as well. China and others move to the airplane position. The poorest two billion grow to three or four billion. But if they escape poverty and children survive, population growth stops in 2050. The number and position of the boxes show this conditional outlook.

Rosling leaning in behind miniature bicycle, car, and airplane models, in front of a screen reading 2050, with yellow-green boxes stacked on a blue box

Source: TED (talk video) / dataphys.org, “Hans Rosling Adopts Physical Visualizations”

The colors of the boxes carry meaning too. At the end of the talk, Rosling calls the developed countries “this blue box.” The CHI 2015 paper by Jansen et al. describes this scene as “rich countries = blue box, poor countries = green box.”

At 6:08, the bubble chart on the screen

In the second half of the talk, Rosling moves from the boxes to the screen.

And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. Every bubble is a country. The size is population.

He says he will show why this happens using “old-time digital technology,” turning the opening joke around. Each bubble on the screen is one country; its size is population and its color is continent. The vertical axis is the number of children per woman, and the horizontal axis is the share of children who survive to school age. Advancing the years from 1960, the motion shows child survival rising and family sizes shrinking.

At 7:47, Rosling ties the boxes to the bubbles.

Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? They are still up here.

The point: the boxes of the poorest people, which he placed over there earlier, are still up here (at the position with many children). His conclusion was that raising child survival to 90% is the only way to stop population growth.

Putting the encodings of the first and second halves side by side gives the following.

	First half: IKEA boxes	Second half: bubble chart
What one mark represents	One billion people	One country
Quantity	Number of boxes	Bubble size (population)
Horizontal position	Level of living (marked by small objects: shoes, bicycle, car, airplane)	Child survival rate
Vertical position	None (boxes at the same level are stacked)	Children per woman
Color	Blue = developed (rich) countries, green = poor countries (as described in the CHI 2015 paper)	Continent
Time	Boxes moved by hand (1960 → 2010 → 2050)	Animation (1960 → present)

What the boxes in the first half show is the magnitude and composition: how many billions of people are at which level. The bubbles in the second half track 50 years of change country by country along two axes. Within a single talk, he can be read as dividing the roles between the physical visualization and the animation. The sentence at 7:47 can be read as a bridge that hands the “billion-person blocks” counted in the first half over to the cloud of country dots in the second.

Later boxes, and other materials

dataphys’s description begins with stacking IKEA boxes in 2010 and says that he later “switched” to pebbles, building toys, juice, snowballs, and toilet paper. He did not, however, give up boxes.

On April 16, 2012, at TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, Rosling gave “Religions and babies.” This time the order is reversed. At 2:20 he shows the bubble chart first and changes the color to “the majority religion of each country.” The boxes appear at 10:25.

I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came. They are quite useful for educational purposes. Each card box is one billion people.

He declares that he will use the cardboard boxes the notebooks handed out at the venue came in, with one box standing for one billion people. The boxes are stacked vertically by age group: 0 to 15 years, two billion; 15 to 30, two billion; 30 to 45, one billion; 45 to 60, almost one billion; 60 and over, one billion. Rosling notes, “These are rounded numbers.” The roughly three billion people missing from the upper age groups will fill in over time. He calls this “the big fill-up” and says the world will reach 10 billion.

Rosling on the TEDxSummit stage, lifting the top box of a vertical stack of cardboard boxes

Source: TED, “Religions and babies”

Here is a summary of how each material was used, as far as could be confirmed.

Material	Occasion	What one piece represents	Second variable
IKEA storage box	TED@Cannes, 2010	One billion people	Horizontal position = level of living
Cardboard box	TEDxSummit (Doha), 2012	One billion people	Vertical stacking = age group
Stones	Interview during TEDxSummit, 2012	Not confirmed	Income levels compared by means of transport
LEGO (DUPLO) blocks and buttons	The Guardian video, 2013	Not confirmed	Not confirmed
Toilet paper	No specific talk or program identified	One billion people (as described by an eyewitness)	Age group (as described by an eyewitness)

The stone example was improvised in an interview setting during TEDxSummit, and Herbert Reininger posted a video of under a minute on YouTube.

A hand arranging white stones on a tiled ground, with a black stone set to the side

Source: Herbert Reininger (YouTube video) / dataphys.org, “Hans Rosling Adopts Physical Visualizations”

In a The Guardian video of May 17, 2013, he uses LEGO blocks to explain population growth, child mortality, and CO2 emissions, according to the video’s description. The correspondence between the blocks and the numbers has not been confirmed. dataphys also lists a LEGO video from the Brookings Institution as part of the same stream as Rosling’s storytelling (related article).

For toilet paper, a blog post by Statistics Finland (2020) describes a scene in which one roll stood for one billion people, stacked by age group. But which talk or program the scene comes from has not been identified. Snowballs appear in the title of a January 2015 BBC Newsnight video, but what they represented has not been confirmed. Juice is said to have been used by dataphys and others, but the scene and what it represented have not been identified.

What the confirmed examples have in common can be read as this: count one piece as one billion people, and let position carry a second variable. They can be read as visualizations that convey magnitude and composition rather than exact values.

How did third parties see these demonstrations?

For a researchers’ placement of the work, there is the paper “Opportunities and Challenges for Data Physicalization” (CHI 2015) by Jansen, Dragicevic, Petra Isenberg, and others. In its Figure 2, the paper cites Rosling’s boxes as an example of a physicalization “updated by hand.” On the left of the same figure is a quality board built from LEGO by a GM engineer.

His physicalizations are useful and effective in communicating information which individuals may find difficult to comprehend due to unfamiliar magnitudes and scales. It can also carry a shock value.

The assessment: they help convey unfamiliar magnitudes and can also carry a shock value. The paper goes on to say that the strength of Rosling’s physicalizations lies in their “pedagogical and persuasive power,” which conventional evaluation by time or error count cannot measure. This points to the need for a different yardstick than the experiment that compared real bar charts on speed.

The visualization researcher Robert Kosara wrote a tribute on eagereyes on February 7, 2017, after Rosling’s death.

Rosling demonstrated the importance of a human voice in visualization. He also used props: apples, rolls of toilet paper – he even swallowed a sword. This is how you make people watch, and this is how you leave an impression.

The assessment: props are a means of making people watch and leaving an impression. Kosara reads Rosling as someone who opened up visualization for explaining, teaching, and entertaining.

There are also assessments that include criticism. On an NPR program on February 11, 2017, the Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin acknowledged the power of animation to overturn how we see the world. He then pointed to the risk that it is taken to mean “don’t worry,” and to problems when the data are used for prediction. This is an assessment of animated charts, not of the boxes.

Uses

Rosling told the dataphys editors:

physical props reach the mind of a large part of the public because thats how you represent data in daily life at the kitchen table, at the cafe and in the bar.

In other words: physical props reach many people because that is how people ordinarily represent data, at the kitchen table, at the cafe, and in the bar.

Three things can be carried back into visualization work.

Fix one unit and declare it. If you say at the start, “this box is one billion,” the audience can follow the magnitude of the world’s population just by counting boxes.
Give the second variable to position, and only one. In 2010 the horizontal position carried income; in 2012 the vertical stacking carried age group. With small-object markers, the levels are clear without reading axis ticks.
Divide the roles between objects and the screen. Show the overall magnitude and composition with boxes, and leave country-by-country change to the bubble chart. As at 7:47, pointing within the later chart to the objects from the first half connects the two representations.

Physical visualizations are not suited to reading fine values. Rosling can be read as having chosen the coarseness of billion-person units and handing the fine changes over to the screen.

References

Primary sources

dataphys.org, “2010 – Hans Rosling Adopts Physical Visualizations” (submitted by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen). https://dataphys.org/list/hans-rosling-adopts-physical-visualizations/ (tag list: https://dataphys.org/list/tags/ted/ )
Hans Rosling, “Global population growth, box by box,” TED@Cannes, recorded 2010-06-21. Transcript: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_growth_box_by_box/transcript
Hans Rosling, “Religions and babies,” TEDxSummit (Doha), recorded 2012-04-16. Transcript: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies/transcript
TED, list of talks by Hans Rosling. https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling
Gapminder, “History of Gapminder.” https://www.gapminder.org/about/about-gapminder/history/
The Guardian, “Population growth and climate change explained by Hans Rosling,” 2013-05-17. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/video/2013/may/17/population-climate-change-hans-rosling-video
Herbert Reininger, “Hans Rosling’s shortest TED talk,” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNs-ziziPyo
BBC Newsnight, “Hans Rosling on global income disparity (and snowballs),” YouTube, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoSTNRhoceY

Secondary sources

Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, Petra Isenberg, et al., “Opportunities and Challenges for Data Physicalization,” CHI 2015. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/72691/1/OA_2015_04_CHI_DataPhys.pdf
Robert Kosara, “Hans Rosling: An Appreciation,” eagereyes, 2017-02-07. https://eagereyes.org/blog/2017/hans-rosling-an-appreciation
Keith Devlin, NPR Weekend Edition, 2017-02-11 (reprinted by WUSF). https://www.wusf.org/2017-02-11/remembering-the-edutainer-who-made-statistics-come-to-life
infosthetics, “More Recent Talks from Hans Rosling (with Original Physical Props),” 2010-07-19. https://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/07/more_recent_talks_from_hans_rosling_with_original_physical_props.html
Tilastokeskus (Statistics Finland), Tieto&trendit blog, 2020-03-18 (in Finnish). https://stat.fi/tietotrendit/blogit/2020/kayttoa-vessapaperille-kotiopetuksessa
NPR Goats and Soda, 2017-02-08. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/08/514074090/video-edutainer-hans-rosling-who-taught-us-about-the-world-has-died

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

Shrinking the Whole Budget to 8,880 Pennies, and Showing a $100 Million Cut as a Quarter of One: Matt Shapiro's Budget Video

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

In 2009, Matt Shapiro shrank the entire US federal budget to 8,880 pennies (one penny = $400 million). He then showed the $100 million spending cut announced by President Obama as one quarter of a single penny. The video is titled “Obama Budget Cuts Visualization.”

The work is listed in the List of Physical Visualizations (dataphys.org), a collection of data physicalization works, under the heading “Federal Budget Explained with 10,000 Pennies.” That heading was given by dataphys.org; the “10,000” comes from the name of the channel that posted it, “10000Pennies.” I have not been able to watch the original video. What follows relies on what FactCheck.org confirmed with the author by email, the author’s blog, and contemporary press coverage.

April 2009: An Order to Cut $100 Million

According to Joe Miller of FactCheck.org, on April 20, 2009, President Obama gathered his Cabinet and directed them to cut a total of $100 million in expenses within 90 days.

On April 20, President Barack Obama caused a bit of a splash when he gathered members of his Cabinet and directed them to cut (collectively) $100 million in expenses within the next 90 days.

The same article introduced Shapiro’s work as a video that helps put this $100 million in perspective.

Shapiro, the author, was a 28-year-old software developer living in Salt Lake City (FactCheck.org). The local station KSL spelled his name Matthias Shapiro and reported that he lived in nearby Holladay. The YouTube channel he posted to, “10000Pennies,” says in its self-introduction that it visualizes policy so that anyone can understand it. The author later started a blog under the name “Political Math.” However, the blog’s first post is dated May 15, 2009, after this video. At the time of this work, the author was less a blogger than a video poster.

I have not been able to confirm the posting date on YouTube. Articles embedding the video appear from April 28 (GovExec), so it can be read as posted in the few days before that.

A screen showing pennies spread across a wooden desk, with white and blue lines running vertically over the coins and a right hand touching a coin in the foreground

Source: Political Math (10000Pennies) / List of Physical Visualizations (dataphys.org)

dataphys.org presents this screen as one from “Obama Budget Cuts Visualization.” What it shows is pennies spread on a desk and two lines, one white and one blue. I could not confirm from written sources how the coins were rearranged during the video or what the lines mark off.

The Budget as 8,880 Pennies, the Cut as a Quarter of One

FactCheck.org confirmed the correspondence of numbers with the author by email.

Matt, whose YouTube channel is entitled 10000 pennies, told us by e-mail that he actually uses 8,880 pennies in his video. The math checks out. Each penny represents $400 million in government spending, so that works out to a budget of $3.552 trillion — pretty close to Obama’s proposed 2010 budget. Obama’s pledge amounts to cutting one-fourth of one of those pennies.

In short: the video uses 8,880 pennies, not 10,000. Each penny stands for $400 million in government spending, the total comes to $3.552 trillion, and that is close to the 2010 fiscal year budget the Obama administration proposed. The President’s $100 million is one quarter of one such penny. FactCheck.org wrote that “the math checks out.”

The correspondence between the data and the objects is as follows.

Data	Physical counterpart	Value
Total federal budget	Number of penny coins (quantity)	8,880 pennies = $3.552 trillion
Conversion unit	One penny	1 penny = $400 million
Cut announced by the President	A fraction of one penny	$100 million = one quarter of a penny
Share of the cut in the whole	Ratio of 8,880 pennies to a quarter of a penny	About 0.0028% (my calculation)

Dividing $100 million by $3.552 trillion gives about 0.0028%, which equals a quarter of a penny divided by 8,880 pennies.

Here, the penny is not used at its original value of one cent. One penny becomes a symbol for $400 million. What the author replaced was not the unit of the $100 million sum but the ratio of the part to the whole, it can be read. The whole budget is shrunk by a single scale, and the cut is shown on that same scale. It can be read as the same idea as a scale model.

Around the same time, the economist Greg Mankiw explained the same ratio in another form. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Mankiw put the cut at 0.003% of the budget and wrote that for a household spending $100,000 a year it would be $3, about one latte at Starbucks. It can be read that Mankiw turned the ratio into “household units,” while Shapiro turned it into “a scale that makes the whole a heap of coins.”

The author wrote by email about the concern behind this form.

I know that we have a really hard time intuitively grasping scale when we’re dealing with two numbers that are orders of magnitude away from each other.

His concern is that it is very hard to grasp intuitively the difference in scale between two numbers that are many orders of magnitude apart. According to FactCheck.org, the author made this video as a way to see numbers “a little fresh,” compared with the usual bar chart.

A video thumbnail with a large reverse side reading ONE CENT and an obverse showing Lincoln’s profile, overlaid on pennies spread across a desk

Source: 10000Pennies (Political Math) / YouTube, “Obama Budget Cuts Visualization”

The video is available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE ). According to dataphys.org, it has 1.7 million views.

I do not know whether the quarter penny was shown by cutting a coin or by a diagram. dataphys.org says “videos often end with a dramatic action,” and lists examples such as cutting a penny in two or spilling several hundred coins off a table. But this describes the series as a whole and does not say which action belongs to this work.

From Coins to Water and Ice: Repeating the Same Procedure

The author later made videos following the same procedure with water and ice. dataphys.org says that “not only coins, but also bills, water, and whiskey represent amounts of money and numbers of jobs,” mentioning whiskey as well, and the channel also has a Lego video. However, I could not confirm the contents of these two.

On May 13, 2009, he released “Obama’s $17 Billion Budget Cuts In Context.” This time the $17 billion cut proposal is shown as a quantity of water. According to Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org, the cut amounts to 2 liters. The video had initially given the difference between the Obama budget and the Bush budget ($3.107 trillion) as 9 gallons.

A video thumbnail of a park lawn, with a hand moving water from a large blue container into a small container

Source: 10000Pennies (Political Math) / YouTube, “Obama’s $17 Billion Budget Cuts In Context”

The 9 gallons was an error, which FactCheck.org found. The correct figure was about 12 gallons. The author added a correction in text to the video and thanked FactCheck.org in the description. In the same description, he also wrote that a $100 million cut would not even be “a drop in the bucket.”

In “What Does The Federal Budget Freeze Look Like?” (January 30, 2010), he showed a budget freeze with water and ice. The author devotes the first half of the blog post to explaining the data used in the video. He explains that if the budget is taken as 192 ounces of water divided into 4-ounce cups, all the calculations in the video work out. The first-year savings of $15 billion are 0.75 ounces of water frozen into ice, measured with one and a half tablespoons.

A table covered with a white cloth, with transparent cups of blue and green water in a row and a small piece of ice a little apart, labeled “Budget Freeze Savings”

Source: Political Math (10000Pennies) / List of Physical Visualizations (dataphys.org)

Putting the three videos side by side gives the following.

Video	Whole	Part taken out
Obama Budget Cuts Visualization (April 2009)	Budget $3.552 trillion = 8,880 pennies	$100 million cut = a quarter of a penny
Obama’s $17 Billion Budget Cuts In Context (May 2009)	Budget = a quantity of water	$17 billion cut = 2 liters
What Does The Federal Budget Freeze Look Like? (January 2010)	Budget $3.7 trillion = 192 ounces of water	$15 billion savings = 0.75 ounces of ice

Dividing $3.7 trillion by 192 ounces gives about $19.3 billion per ounce. 0.75 ounces is about $14.5 billion, which nearly matches $15 billion. Even as the material changes, the procedure appears to stay the same: fix the quantity of the whole first, then take the policy amount out as a part of it.

In one of his earliest blog posts, “The National Debt Road Trip” (May 15, 2009), the author writes that he tilted the numbers in Obama’s favor so as to leave no room for the charge of fudging. This is not a statement about this work, but it offers a clue to how he handled numbers.

How Third Parties Saw the Video

The first point is the verification of the numbers. FactCheck.org confirmed the number of coins and the unit value with the author and wrote that the math was right. In the follow-up, it found an error, confirmed that the author had fixed it, and then commented as follows.

Thanks to Matt’s helpful images, you don’t have to be an accountant to grasp the size of the budget problem.

The assessment is that, thanks to Matt’s clear images, you do not need to be an accountant to grasp the size of the budget problem. The first article also notes that the liberal economist Paul Krugman made the same point on his blog, that $100 million is small.

The second point is the response to the difficulty of large numbers. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic introduced this work in an April 2009 blog post.

Numbers a million times bigger than our total lifetime earnings literally boggle the imagination.

In short, a number a million times our lifetime earnings is literally beyond imagination. McArdle introduced the author as an “ambitious video blogger” who took on that problem. Alyssa Rosenberg of GovExec also cited that post, embedded the video, and called it a “fun, educational video.”

The third is a skeptical view. Adam Paul of The Think Tankard wrote on May 4, 2009, linking to McArdle’s post.

Video bloggers have taken to using piles of pennies to represent the budget … The concern is great and if the goal is simply to inform people it’s doing a good job. Yet any hopes that people might apply, or that that matter retain, their knowledge suffers from the same problems that “awareness” movements always have: how to turn knowledge into action.

His point: video bloggers have taken to representing the budget with piles of pennies, and if the aim is to inform, they do a good job. But whether the knowledge is retained or leads to action runs into the same problem that awareness campaigns always have.

dataphys.org introduces the author as someone who “criticizes the US policy” with statistics and handmade physical visualizations. The author himself wrote in the description of the follow-up that a $100 million cut would not even be “a drop in a bucket” (“weren’t even a drop in a bucket”). According to KSL, in July 2009 Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele presented the author with a “Grassroots Logic Award.” From these, it can be read that the video also had a partisan aim of criticizing the administration. At the same time, placing FactCheck.org’s verification next to Krugman’s identical point suggests that the way of presenting the ratio itself holds across party lines.

Takeaways

The first thing to take from this video is to put the whole and the part on the same scale. Showing only $100 million does not settle whether it is large or small. The design of preparing the whole as a quantity of 8,880 pennies and assigning the cut a quarter of one penny can be read as a way of making the denominator of the ratio visible.

The second is to choose the unit’s value from the size at which the whole fits. The value of $400 million per penny can be read as chosen so that the whole budget fits within a manageable quantity. At $100 million per penny the cut would take one penny, but the whole would exceed 35,000. The unit is decided by whether you want the whole or the part to be the more manageable quantity.

The third is to make the basis of the conversion checkable from outside. FactCheck.org confirmed the calculation just by asking for the number of coins and the unit value, and found an error in the follow-up. For the freeze video, the author published the conversion himself on his blog. If the basis is open, outsiders can give you the occasion to correct it.

Finally, the limits. As Adam Paul wrote, understanding scale and changing behavior are different things. The question this video answered was how to compare two numbers that differ by many orders of magnitude on a single scale. What comes after that is left to the viewer and to the places where the debate happens.

References

Primary sources

List of Physical Visualizations (dataphys.org), “2009 – Federal Budget Explained with 10,000 Pennies” (contributed by Pierre Dragicevic): https://dataphys.org/list/federal-budget-explained-with-10000-pennies/
dataphys.org tag pages, storytelling: https://dataphys.org/list/tags/storytelling/ / budget: https://dataphys.org/list/tags/budget/
10000Pennies, “Obama Budget Cuts Visualization” (YouTube, April 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE (title and poster confirmed via oEmbed: https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE&format=json )
YouTube channel 10000Pennies (video list, channel description): https://www.youtube.com/user/10000Pennies/videos
10000Pennies, “Obama’s $17 Billion Budget Cuts In Context” (YouTube, 2009-05-13, description): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miIBp7ufxjk
10000Pennies, “What Does The Federal Budget Freeze Look Like?” (YouTube, 2010-01-30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMH9QZdjS2Y
Political Math blog: https://www.politicalmathblog.com/
Political Math, “What Does the Federal Budget Freeze Look Like?”, 2010-01-31: https://www.politicalmathblog.com/2010/01/31/what-does-the-federal-budget-freeze-look-like/
Political Math, “The National Debt Road Trip”, 2009-05-15: https://www.politicalmathblog.com/2009/05/15/the-national-debt-road-trip/

Secondary sources

Joe Miller, “What’s in a Number?”, FactCheck.org, 2009-05-07: https://www.factcheck.org/2009/05/whats-in-a-number/
Brooks Jackson, “Drop in the Bucket? See for Yourself.”, FactCheck.org, 2009-05-15: https://www.factcheck.org/2009/05/drop-in-the-bucket-see-for-yourself/
Megan McArdle, “Penny Wise, Pound Foolish”, The Atlantic, April 2009 (the original URL, http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/04/penny_wise_pound_foolish_1.php, no longer opens). Full-text reprint: https://thinkingonthemargin.blogspot.com/2009_04_26_archive.html
Alyssa Rosenberg, “What $100 Million Looks Like”, GovExec, 2009-04-28: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/2009/04/what-100-million-looks-like/38913/
Adam Paul, “Learning Large Numbers”, The Think Tankard, 2009-05-04: https://thinktankard.blogspot.com/2009/05/learning-large-numbers.html
Andrew Adams, “Utahn’s YouTube video catches RNC’s attention”, KSL, 2009-07-08: https://www.ksl.com/article/7084161
Legal Insurrection, “Obama Budget Cuts Visualization”, 2009-04-29: https://legalinsurrection.com/2009/04/obama-budget-cuts-visualization/
“Obama’s $100 million budget cut amounts to a cup of coffee”, Christian Science Monitor, 2009-04-21 (Mankiw’s analogy; it does not mention this work): https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2009/0421/obamas-100-million-budget-cut-amounts-to-a-cup-of-coffee

Strip Counts Set the Band Width, and a Photograph Inverts Black and White: IBM's Cosmograph

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

The Cosmograph (International Cosmograph) was a charting device sold by IBM. It expressed the width of a band by the number of paper strips laid side by side. One thousand white strips made 100%. On a black work board, the strips were bundled, divided, and held with clamps. The finished board was photographed with a photostat, and the negative print, with black and white inverted, was used as the graph.

The sources are IBM’s sales manual (including a page revised on January 31, 1934) and Chapter 8, “Flow Charts,” of Willard Cope Brinton’s textbook on charts, Graphic Presentation (1939). The manual was found in IBM’s archives in 2012 by Jim Strickland, a volunteer at the Computer History Museum, who presented it with images and a transcription. It also appears as “1933 – IBM’s Cosmograph” in dataphys.org, a catalog of examples of data physicalization. What follows sticks to these materials.

A Device in IBM’s 1933 Sales Manual

The 1933 U.S. copyright catalog lists a chapter of IBM’s “Manual of sales instruction, 1933” as “International cosmograph. © June 9; AA 130049.” What was registered was a document, a chapter of a sales manual, not rights to the device itself.

What the device was can be learned from the 1934 sales manual that Strickland found. Its preface says:

The drawing of graphs usually requires the time and skill of an accomplished draughtsman. The Cosmograph, however, due to its simplicity of construction and operation, requires no skill or foreknowledge beyond that imparted in a few moments’ instruction.

In short: drawing graphs takes the time and skill of a trained draftsman, but the Cosmograph requires no skill beyond a few moments of explanation.

A page from IBM’s sales manual. At the top is a photograph of the device, in which white paper strips split left and right on a black board; below it are the price, uses, components, dimensions, and weight

Source: IBM, Manual of Business Instruction (Rev. 1-31-34), photographed by Jim Strickland, from the Computer History Museum “Volunteer Information Exchange” Vol.2 No.16

The “SPECIAL DEVICES” chapter of the same manual has a page with a photograph of the device and its price. The price is “$50.00 each, f.o.b. Endicott, N. Y.,” that is, 50 dollars per unit. However, the upper right of this page reads “Rev. 1-31-34,” a revision of January 31, 1934. Whether this was the 1933 price has not been confirmed.

The components are a grooved work board with Bakelite fasteners, 1,000 paper strips, wedges and clamps, edge guides, and a carrying case. The strips are described as “1000 strips of white charting paper divided by blue strips at each 1% mark and red strips at each 5% mark.” The dimensions are 30 × 23 × 2 inches (about 76 × 58 × 5 cm, converted by the author).

A note on the names used at the time. IBM’s wording is “International Cosmograph,” and Brinton explains “Cosmograph” as a trade name for a kind of flow chart. A flow chart that shows quantity by band width is now classified as a Sankey diagram, and the dataphys.org tag uses that name. But this is a later classification; it appears in neither the manual nor Brinton’s book.

Who devised it, how many were sold, and where an actual unit survives could not be confirmed.

Count 1,000 Strips to Make the Band Width

Page 78 of Brinton’s book shows how it was used, with photographs provided by IBM.

Two photographs: on the left, hands pressing and holding a bundle of white strips on a black board; on the right, a tool being inserted between the bundles

Source: Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Presentation (1939), p.78 (plate: International Business Machines Corp.) / from the Internet Archive (Internet Archive rights status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT)

One thousand strips of paper are set on edge to represent 100%, and are separated into component parts of 100%.

That is, 1,000 paper strips are stood on edge to make 100% and then divided into its components. The left photograph shows the stage of positioning the strips and holding them with clamps; the right shows wedges and bar spacers being inserted between the bundles.

The manual describes how quantity is laid out:

It requires no measurements or computing for measurement. … Each minimum percentage unit of data is represented by one white strip.

That is, no measuring and no calculation for measuring is needed; the smallest unit of a percentage is represented by one white strip. One strip is equivalent to 0.1% (the author’s calculation).

The width of a band is decided not by measuring with a ruler and drawing, but by counting strips. The correspondence between data and device is summarized below.

Data side	Device side	Source
The whole (100%)	1,000 strips	Brinton p.78
Smallest unit of a percentage	One white strip (0.1%, the author’s calculation)	Manual
Share of each item	Number of strips in a bundle = band width	Manual
Scale mark every 1%	Blue strip	Manual
Scale mark every 5%	Red strip (20 strips)	Manual, Brinton p.78
Divisions between items	Wedges and bars between bundles	Brinton p.78
Path of a flow	Position where strips are bent and held with clamps	Brinton p.78
Frame of the figure	Edge guides	Brinton p.78

The scale is inside the band, not outside it. The blue and red strips enter the same bundle as the white strips, at fixed positions. This can be read as a design that gives the band itself its scale, without placing an axis outside.

Because the smallest unit is one strip, proportions are placed in steps of 0.1% (the author’s calculation). In exchange, the accuracy of band width is supported by the number of strips, not by drafting skill. The manual could say that no skill was required, and this mechanism can be read as the reason.

Invert the White Strips on the Black Board with a Photograph

The finished board is not the finished product. Brinton writes that once the edge guides hide the leftover ends of the strips, “the Cosmograph is ready for photostatting.” That is, it is ready to go to the photostat.

On the left, a photograph of the completed device with bands of white strips spreading up and down on a black board; on the right, a negative print in which the same arrangement appears as black bands on a white ground

Source: Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Presentation (1939), p.78 (plate: International Business Machines Corp.) / from the Internet Archive (Internet Archive rights status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT)

Note that all black portions of the device fail to reproduce. Of the one thousand strips of paper, twenty are red and are set at each 5% mark. In the negative photostat, these red strips of paper reproduce as white.

That is, all the black parts of the device fail to reproduce, and the 20 red strips, set at every 5% mark, come out white in the negative. The arrangement of white strips on the black board becomes black bands on a white ground in the print. The red strips remain as thin white lines inside the black bands. How the blue strips appeared in the negative could not be confirmed.

The manual also says that what is used as the graph is the print.

When all groups have been arranged a photostat of the board is made. The negative print, on which the groups appear in black against a white background, is used as the graph.

That is, once all the groups are arranged, a photostat of the board is made, and the negative print, in which the groups appear black on white, is used as the graph. The strips on the board were not the final form for people to read but an intermediate form for producing a printed piece. The black board was meaningful precisely because it did not reproduce.

Two Figures Built for Reparations and for Income and Outgo

Page 80 of Brinton’s book carries two figures made with the Cosmograph. The first is the distribution of German reparations.

A flow chart in which bands split from the total on the left to France, Britain, Italy, and others; some stop partway, and the rest gather at the United States on the right

Source: Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Presentation (1939), p.80 (plate: International Business Machines Corp.) / from the Internet Archive (Internet Archive rights status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT)

On the left are the total Germany paid and the countries that received it; in the center is the amount each country kept; on the right is the amount paid from each country to the United States. The amount kept is shown by branches that stop partway. According to Brinton, this is made by pulling the strips back and aligning their ends at the center of the figure. They are only pulled back, and cutting is not mentioned, so the total number can be read as unchanged.

The second is “Simple Income and Outgo,” a figure of plain income and expenditure.

A flow chart in which income bands entering from the left merge into a thick central trunk, which then splits to the right and downward into expenditure bands such as salaries, taxes, dividends, and savings interest

Source: Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Presentation (1939), p.80 (plate: International Business Machines Corp.) / from the Internet Archive (Internet Archive rights status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT)

The central trunk is fixed first, the income side is assembled, and then the board is turned to assemble the outgo side. About the space for the amount on the trunk, Brinton writes:

A short strip of black paper is pasted across the trunk to provide a white block on the negative photostatic print.

That is, pasting a short strip of black paper across the trunk makes a white block in the negative, where the total amount is entered in type. Even the label space was made on the assumption of inversion. On the printed page, the white block reads “$2,193,427,000.”

The figure also has a vertical note, which the author read from the scan of the page.

EACH INTERVAL BETWEEN THE WHITE LINES INDICATES 5 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL … IT IS NECESSARY ONLY TO COUNT THE INTERVALS AND FRACTIONAL INTERVALS.

The note says that each interval between the white lines is 5% of the total, and that to know a proportion one need only count the intervals and fractional intervals. It can be read as a mechanism in which the reader counts the quantity the maker placed by counting strips.

How Third Parties Viewed the Device

Jim Strickland saw “cosmograph” on an exhibit poster at the Computer History Museum, looked into what it was, and in October 2012 found the sales manual in IBM’s archives.

In 1933, for $50.00, ($850.00 in 2012) a business could buy a device to illustrate financial inputs and outputs by separating and grouping strips of white paper against a black background.

That is, in 1933, for 50 dollars, a business could buy a device that illustrated the flow of money in and out by grouping strips of white paper against a black background. The article ends with “Eat your heart out Excel!”, treating the device as an ancestor of the charting features of spreadsheet software. However, the page cited for the price is the January 1934 revision.

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, in its 2023 exhibition “Emerging Patterns,” placed Brinton’s figure in the history of the Sankey diagram and wrote:

The replacement of ‘cosmograph’ with ‘Sankey’ is a loss for the world of data visualization.

That is, the replacement of the name Cosmograph with Sankey is a loss. The exhibition describes the method as “using pins to guide the paths of the strips,” but what Brinton and the manual describe are clamps and wedges; pins do not appear.

Phineas of sankey-diagrams.com wrote in 2009 that Brinton’s Chapter 8 puts its emphasis on “Cosmographs,” which seems to have been an IBM trade name of the time. Another article on the same site reports that, in a discussion among Spanish-speaking makers, “cosmografías” was raised as a term in James Glenn Stovall’s Infographics (1997). This can be read as an example of a trade name surviving as a generic name for flow charts, but I have not checked Stovall’s original.

What to Take From It

The first is a design that “counts” quantity instead of “measuring” it. When you draw by length, accuracy depends on the skill of the person drawing. When you place by number of units, accuracy can be read as supported by the counting. In exchange, precision is set by the size of the unit, which for the Cosmograph works out to steps of 0.1%. Choosing the unit also chooses the precision.

The second is a design that puts the scale inside the mark. The red strips became white lines inside the bands in the print, and counting those lines gave the proportion. Even without an axis outside, clues for reading can be left inside the band.

The third is a view that treats a physical object as an intermediate form for output. The black board was meaningful because it did not reproduce, and even the label space assumed inversion. Deciding first what the result will pass through at the end changes how colors and materials are chosen.

Finally, the name. At the time, these figures were called Cosmograph or flow chart. If you search for past figures only under the classification “Sankey diagram,” you may overlook figures that went by different names.

References

Primary sources

IBM sales manual “Manual of Business Instruction” (1934): the preface, the explanatory text, and the “SPECIAL DEVICES / COSMOGRAPH” page (Rev. 1-31-34). Reproduced as images and transcription in Jim Strickland’s article: http://s3data.computerhistory.org.s3.amazonaws.com/chmedu/VIE_02_016.pdf
Catalog of Copyright Entries, New Series, Part 1 Group 2: Pamphlets, Leaflets…, Vol.30 (1933), entry “International business machines corp.” with “International cosmograph. © June 9; AA 130049.”: https://archive.org/details/catalogofcopyri301libr (relevant page: https://archive.org/details/catalogofcopyri301libr/page/n769/mode/1up )
Willard Cope Brinton, Graphic Presentation, New York: Brinton Associates, 1939, Chapter 8 “Flow Charts,” pp.73–80, and the glossary at the end: https://archive.org/details/graphicpresentat00brinrich (p.78: https://archive.org/details/graphicpresentat00brinrich/page/78/mode/1up / p.80: https://archive.org/details/graphicpresentat00brinrich/page/80/mode/1up )
dataphys.org, “1933 – IBM’s Cosmograph” (entered by Pierre Dragicevic): https://dataphys.org/list/ibms-cosmograph/

Secondary sources

Jim Strickland, “Cosmograph? What’s a Cosmograph?”, Volunteer Information Exchange Vol.2 No.16, Computer History Museum, 2012-11-23: http://s3data.computerhistory.org.s3.amazonaws.com/chmedu/VIE_02_016.pdf
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, “Emerging Patterns: Data Visualization Through History” (2023), “Sankey and Venn Diagrams”: https://fisherdigitus.library.utoronto.ca/exhibits/show/emerging-patterns--data-visual/network-diagrams/network-diagrams--sankey-and-v
Phineas, “1939 Graphic Presentation Book”, sankey-diagrams.com, 2009-09-16: https://www.sankey-diagrams.com/1939-graphic-presentation-book/
Phineas, “Infographics Experts on Sankey Diagrams (Part 2)”, sankey-diagrams.com, 2009-08-18: https://www.sankey-diagrams.com/infographics-experts-on-sankey-diagrams-part-2/

The Lines Appear to Be Physical; the Scales Are Text Added Afterward — Steven Pinker's Glowing Line Charts

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

In a video released in 2018 on Bill Gates’s channel, the line charts in front of Steven Pinker appear, judging from the footage, to be real glowing lines bent and hung in place. The scales, titles, and country names are text added over the video afterward. I have not found any explanation from the production side. The video runs about two and a half minutes and shows three line charts: global life expectancy, life expectancy by age in England, and the share of children who die before age 5.

My entry point is the item “Steven Pinker explains Global Life Expectancy with Physical Line Charts” in dataphys.org, a catalog of data physicalization. The observations and timestamps below are based on the video Gates posted on X (formerly Twitter; about 2 minutes 29 seconds) and its English subtitles. The YouTube version matches in subject, publisher, and timing, but I have not compared the two frame by frame.

February 2018: Two and a Half Minutes on Gates’s Channel

The video is titled “Humanity is fighting back against the Grim Reaper”. It was published on Bill Gates’s YouTube channel on February 13, 2018 (YouTube). The description is a single line.

Author Steven Pinker explains how life spans have skyrocketed in the past two centuries.

In other words, the video presents Pinker explaining how much life spans have grown over the past two centuries. The link in the description redirects to the page for Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2018 Annual Letter, and the URL contains a tracking string, “AnnualLetter2018_Pinker”. I have not been able to read the body of the destination page, but the link suggests the video was made to accompany the Annual Letter.

Eleven days later, on February 24, 2018, Gates posted the video on X.

People today are living longer, healthier, and happier lives than ever before. I asked @sapinker to explain why.

The post says that people today live longer, healthier, and happier lives than ever before, and that Gates asked Pinker to explain why. Because it says “I asked”, the video can be read as one requested from Gates’s side.

Item	Details
Speaker	Steven Pinker. The opening name caption reads “Author / Psychologist / Professor / Harvard University”
Published by	Bill Gates’s YouTube channel (February 13, 2018); X (February 24, 2018)
End screen	The book title “ENLIGHTENMENT NOW” drawn in glowing lines, followed by the “gatesnotes” logo
Production company / director	Not shown in the video or in any text source; cannot be identified

Enlightenment Now is a book Pinker published with Viking in 2018. Its official site describes it as “In 75 jaw-dropping graphs”. I have not been able to confirm which figures in the book correspond to the three graphs in the video.

The dataphys.org entry is titled “Global Life Expectancy”, but the video shows three graphs.

	Title on screen	Time on screen	Lines
A	Global Life Expectancy by Age	about 0:07–0:45	1 red line
B	Life Expectancy by Age in England	about 0:45–1:22	10 lines (at birth, and at ages 1 to 70)
C	Children Dying Before Age 5	about 1:22–2:20	4 lines, then 1 more added for 5

The longest is C (about one minute), which is not in the entry’s title. C is also where a country is added.

The Lines Can Be Held in the Hand

The footage offers four clues that the lines are physical objects.

In the close-up from 0:05 to 0:09, Pinker’s hand grips the end of A’s red line.
In the wide shots at 0:04 and 2:20, the three graphs stand in separate places in the same room. Pinker’s head comes in front of B’s lines and hides them.
In the close-up from 2:04 to 2:06, a hand brings in a yellow line and hangs it on C’s frame. The line sways and settles into place.
In the close-ups, the way the lines look changes with the camera angle.

A close-up in which many glowing lines of England’s life expectancy by age cross the frame, with Pinker behind them bringing his hand toward a line

Source: frame from the Bill Gates (Gates Notes) video / dataphys.org

In the close-up around 1:39, Sweden’s line is visible. It is a thin wire bent into the shape of the data and glowing blue all over. It can be read as an EL wire (a thin cable that glows with electricity) or an LED light tube of some kind. I have not found any source that discloses the material. The Ethiopia line that is brought in bends, so the material is somewhat flexible.

The frame is a metal post standing on the floor. The left and right edges of each graph line up with the posts. The horizontal line at the bottom also looks like a physical crossbar, but that is a reading from appearance.

There are things I could not confirm. dataphys.org writes that the graphs sway slightly when Pinker touches them. In still frames, I could not tell a sway caused by touch apart from camera shake. The line clearly moves when the Ethiopia line is brought in. I have also found no source in which the production side says the lines were built physically, so from the footage alone I cannot fully rule out CG compositing.

The Scales and Country Names Sit on Top of the Footage

Unlike the lines, the text attached to the graphs is not physical. The deciding scene is the final wide shot around 2:20. Only the lines of the three graphs appear in the room, with no scales, titles, or country names. The same lines are on screen without the text, so the text can be identified as something laid over the footage in editing.

A wide shot in which Pinker points left among four glowing line charts, with white text for scales, titles, and country names across the screen

Source: frame from the Bill Gates (Gates Notes) video / dataphys.org

Sorting the correspondence between data and appearance by physical object versus overlaid text gives the following.

Data	Appearance	Physical or overlaid text (judgment from the footage)
Values (years of life expectancy, share dying before 5)	Height of the line	Physical line
Year	Horizontal position of the line	Physical line
Series (age in B, country in C)	Color of the line	Physical line (the lines appear to glow by themselves)
Series names (ages, country names)	White text near the line	Overlaid text
Scales, axis numbers, titles	White text at the left, right, and bottom of the screen	Overlaid text
Frame	Metal posts	Physical
Adding a series	A line is brought by hand and hung	Physical action

The physical object handles the shape of the lines, and the video handles the annotation needed to read that shape as numbers. It can be read as the two together making a graph that can actually be read.

A wide shot in which Pinker points to the upper right of a bundle of glowing lines showing England’s life expectancy by age

Source: frame from the Bill Gates (Gates Notes) video / dataphys.org

Measuring the frames with the overlaid scales as a ruler also reveals how the axes are built. B’s vertical axis has tick intervals that get tighter toward the top, so they are not evenly spaced. The ticks on A’s horizontal axis are 1770, 1820, 1870, 1913, 1950, 1973, 2000, and 2015. The gaps between years vary from 50 years to 15 years, yet the spacing between ticks on screen is nearly equal at about 130–170 px, and the bends in the line sit at those years’ positions. This can be read as a line laid out horizontally by the order of the data points, not by the length of time. As a result, the second half, 102 years from 1913 to 2015 (about 630 px), looks wider than the first half, 143 years from 1770 to 1913 (about 430 px).

The scales are overlaid, but the source of the data is not shown anywhere in the video, nor in the YouTube description. Comparing against the current Our World in Data (OWID) series gives the following.

Graph	Series compared	Points that match	Points that do not match
A World	OWID life expectancy	The years on the scale are a subset of the years in OWID’s world series	From 1913 to 1973, the video’s values are 3–5 years higher
B England	OWID life expectancy at different ages	The age-specific lines start in the 1840s	The video’s value for 1841 is lower
C Under-5 deaths	OWID child mortality	Sweden starts at about 30% in 1751, with a peak in the 1770s	The years where the Canada and Chile lines start differ

For C, Sweden’s starting year and peak position match well. But all of these are comparisons with the current versions, and I cannot tell whether the differences come from the 2018 versions or from reading error. The source cannot be determined.

Tracing and Adding Lines: Narration and Hand Movements

Because the lines are handled as physical objects, as they appear to be, Pinker’s hand movements double as the steps of the explanation. The correspondence between narration and screen is as follows.

Time	Narration	Screen
0:01–0:12	Newborns long ago could expect to live only 30 years	From a wide shot to a close-up of a hand gripping the end of the red line
0:12–0:24	Newborns today can expect 70 years or more, and 80 or more in developed regions	A finger traces A’s line from left to right and points to the high point at the right end
0:45–1:22	Looking at the lines by age, using England as an example	The hand moves up from the lower lines to the upper lines
1:50–1:58	Chile cut its child mortality in 30 years	The hand indicates the steep drop of the red line
2:04–2:07	Looking at an African country such as Ethiopia	A hand brings in the yellow line and hangs it; in the next shot the text “ETHIOPIA” is added

In C, the lines are not all there from the start.

Take an African country like Ethiopia. In 1980, almost a quarter of the children died before their fifth birthday.

The narration says that in Ethiopia in 1980, almost a quarter of children died before their fifth birthday. On this sentence, Pinker brings in the yellow line by hand. The movement of one line being added coincides with the turn in the story toward “progress is happening in developing countries too”. The narration also says, “Each line shows a country representing a different continent.” The five countries can be read as one each for Europe, North America, Asia, South America, and Africa. The subtitles name only Sweden, Chile (“In Latin America”), and Ethiopia (“an African country”).

Because the line is brought and hung by hand, it sways and takes a moment to settle. The addition of a new series is visible as a movement. By choosing physical lines, the video seems to have been able to act out, on screen, the steps of the explanation: tracing with a finger, raising a hand, adding one line.

How Third Parties Saw This Video

The dataphys.org entry was registered by Yvonne Jansen, with information contributed by Cedric Honnet.

At first glance it appears that line charts are digitally overlaid on the video. However, closeups and a light swaying of the graphs when Steven Pinker touches them, as well as the addition of another country towards the end of the video indicate that the graphs visible in this video are actually physical line graphs.

The reading is that, at first glance, the line charts look digitally overlaid on the video, but the close-ups, the sway on touch, and the addition of a country near the end show that they are physical line charts. The category is “Passive physical visualization”, and the tags are “rearrangeable” and “storytelling”. On the lines, this matches the clues in the footage, but the text really is digitally overlaid. As for the sway, I could not confirm it in still frames.

Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, and Jean-Daniel Fekete presented an evaluation experiment on physical visualizations at CHI 2013 (article in Japanese). The abstract says:

The efficiency of physical visualizations seems to stem from features that are unique to physical objects, such as their ability to be touched and their perfect visual realism.

The conclusion is that the efficiency of physical visualizations seems to come from properties unique to physical objects, such as being touchable and looking perfectly real. The subject was 3D bar charts, not line charts. Even so, being touchable does not reach the video’s viewers; it belongs only to Pinker on screen. Visual realism survives the trip through the video. This video can be read as handing only the latter to its viewers.

In May 2018, Jeremy Lent criticized how the graphs in Enlightenment Now were chosen. While granting that the book’s 75 graphs do show progress, he calls it a “selective view of progress”, that is, a view that looks only at the progress that suits the argument. The way the video adds countries one line at a time can also be read as connecting to the point that the impression changes depending on which countries are chosen.

Takeaways for Use

What this video offers to take away is a way of dividing what is made physical from what is left to the video. Only the shape of the lines, which appear to be physical, was placed in the room; all the text needed for reading was overlaid in editing. The lines can be grabbed by hand, and the text stays legible even when a person stands in front of it.

When filming a physical graph, make physical the things the hand touches in the explanation and the things that get added or removed. Overlay what should be readable from any angle, such as numbers and names. Ending with a wide shot without text lets viewers check how much was physical.

The action of adding a series is also usable. Bringing in one line by hand, as with the Ethiopia line, leaves the moment a new comparison joins as a visible movement. It can be read as marking a break in the story more clearly than drawing in an extra line on screen.

What this video lacks is also a point to take away. The source of the data appears nowhere on screen, and A’s horizontal axis was not proportional to the length of years. Physical objects catch the eye, and for that reason the construction of the axes and the source are easy to overlook. Precisely when showing something physically, the source and the construction of the axes need to be written in the overlaid text or in the description.

References

Primary sources

dataphys.org, “Steven Pinker explains Global Life Expectancy with Physical Line Charts”: https://dataphys.org/list/steven-pinker-explains-global-life-expectancy-with-physical-line-charts/
Bill Gates, “Humanity is fighting back against the Grim Reaper”, YouTube, February 13, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJPlwaYKzo
YouTube oEmbed (title and publisher): https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJPlwaYKzo&format=json
Bill Gates’s post on X, February 24, 2018: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/967449421238579201
X video streaming playlist (video file and English subtitles): https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/963248646262284289/pl/2kD1mFd_Szq2Ipmo.m3u8
Link in the YouTube description: http://b-gat.es/2Eac9LN (redirects to https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter ; body not checked)
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Viking, 2018. Introduction on the official site: https://stevenpinker.com/publications/enlightenment-now-case-reason-science-humanism-and-progress
Series used for comparing the data (current versions)
- Our World in Data, “Life expectancy”: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy (metadata: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy.metadata.json )
- Our World in Data, “Life expectancy at different ages”: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-different-ages
- Our World in Data, “Child mortality”: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality (metadata: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality.metadata.json )
- Max Roser, “Twice as long — life expectancy around the world”, Our World in Data, 2018: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-globally
- James C. Riley, “Estimates of Regional and Global Life Expectancy, 1800–2001,” 2005. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005.00083.x

Secondary sources

Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, Jean-Daniel Fekete, “Evaluating the Efficiency of Physical Visualizations,” CHI 2013. doi:10.1145/2470654.2481359 / HAL: https://inria.hal.science/hal-00781831
Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.”, Patterns of Meaning, May 17, 2018: https://patternsofmeaning.com/2018/05/17/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/
Douglas Fischer’s introduction to Lent’s article, EHN, May 18, 2018: https://www.ehn.org/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why-resilience
M. Özgür Nevres, “People today are living longer, healthier, and happier lives than ever before”, March 13, 2018: https://ourplnt.com/people-living-longer-healthier-happier

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/