Project Crush-testing Icons and Glyphs: how small can they get?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich
M.Sc. Dora Kiesel
M.F.A. M.Sc. Irene López García

Icons and glyphs are popular concepts to show multi-variate data in a compact manner, e.g., to locate information on a map, encode different species in a biodiversity study or examine logged interaction sequences. Typically, glyphs are rather small and their size can be used to encode ordered data.  But how small can the glyphs of a glyph set be scaled before individual glyphs become indistinguishable? Can we develop a metric to predict whether the glyphs in a glyph set remain distinguishable at small scales?

The project will address these questions. To this end, we will first explore the design space of glyphs, typify glyphs, approach the existing literature on glyph scalability (and related concepts), and finally obtain reference values for glyph similarity with the help of a user study. Based on this knowledge, we will identify error types in small-scale glyphs and develop design guidelines and mechanisms for checking the distinctness of glyphs, ideally automatically.

All participants should enjoy working in an interdisciplinary group and be able to converse in English. In addition, you should have:

• Programming skills in Javascript.
• A completed Visualization course.
• An interest and knowledge on conducting user studies.

The final assessment of your work will be conducted based on the project contributions of every team member, including:

• Active participation in the project during and in between weekly meetings
• Presentation of read literature
• Design, implementation and conduction of a user study
• Intermediate and final project presentations
• Documentation