The Exploratorium's Pathways project will develop three exhibit prototypes intended to identify effective strategies for creating visualization tools that will engage the public in emerging research on ocean microbes and their impact on our planet. The research will inform a future full-scale development project to use real-time data visualizations on the connection between ocean microbes and climate, an essential principle of climate literacy as identified by the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program.
In partnership with the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education at the University of Hawaii and the Visualization Interface and Design Innovation Group at UC Davis, prototypes will be designed and developed through a collaborative and iterative process that includes a front-end study of visitors' interests and prior knowledge related to ocean microbes, and interviews with scientists to identify potential datasets and activities. Word Craft will identify promising strategies for engaging the public and describe findings and implications for future development and will test prototypes with Exploratorium visitors through a formative evaluation process.
The primary audience for the research is a cross-disciplinary professional audience, consisting of the immediate project team of computer scientists, microbiologists, exhibit designers, and the wider field of informal science education, scientists, and technologists who will be reached through the dissemination efforts. A survey of current visualizations used in public media will be produced and disseminated along with project findings at the Association of Science-Technology Centers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Science on a Sphere Users Group Meeting, the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education, the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence, the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography meetings, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.
The broader impact of the project will be the knowledge generated on ways to engage informal learners using visualizations of real scientific data, which will be of interest to both scientists and educators across disciplines.
The ocean is a living liquid, each drop filled with millions of bacteria, viruses, and other microbes. These tiny creatures are responsible for life on earth as we know it: They are the base of the marine food chain; they produce half the oxygen we breathe; and they absorb more carbon than all forests. Despite their critical role on our planet, until recently we’ve known little about marine microbes. This is changing thanks to revolutionary new tools for collecting data such as remote ocean sensing and new genomic techniques. With this new data, scientists are making dramatic discoveries about microbes and their relationship to the environment. Despite these advances, the public knows very little about the critical importance of the ocean’s microbes and the new tools used to study them. Living Liquid was an NSF-funded Pathways (or pilot) project to address this need by sharing new research about the ocean’s microbes using a real simulation tool used by scientists. The project, led by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, brought together marine microbiologists from MIT, the University of Hawaii, UC Santa Cruz, and the Visualization and Interface Design Innovation group at UC Davis. This multidisciplinary team successfully adapted a real scientific simulation into a pilot exhibit that could be used by the general public to explore ocean microbes. More broadly, the project contributed research and other findings that address the increasingly important challenge of creating scientific visualizations for the public. Creating a scientific visualization tool that can be used by the general public The primary goal of the Living Liquid project was to find a way to engage the public with real scientific data through visualization tools, such as simulations. Visualizations are increasingly important in science to analyze the large amounts of data that researchers collect. After in-depth consultations with scientists and others, the team decided to adapt a simulation developed at MIT called the Darwin Project, which scientists use to study the amount and type of marine microbes living in the global oceans. The Living Liquid team used the Darwin Project data to create a visualization that (1) could be more easily understood by the general public and (2) was interactive, allowing visitors explore the microscopic creatures in the ocean with movable "lenses" layered on the original simulation. This new interactive simulation was found to be very successful: museum visitors could make observations, form hypotheses, and perform other tasks with the scientists’ simulation. Based on the success of this NSF-funded pilot project, the Living Liquid team will be creating a final, large-scale interactive exhibit. Providing educational research for future projects on visualization or marine microbiology The Living Liquid team also conducted a number of studies with our visitors to inform the design of our exhibit and contribute to the body of knowledge on visualization exhibits. First, the team did a study on visitors’ prior interests and knowledge in marine microbes. Findings from this study not only influenced the direction of our exhibit, but are being used by others developing exhibits or other materials related to ocean microbes. Our team also conducted user testing with variations of our pilot exhibit. These variations included ways to help the general public understand the visualization (such as color changes) and ways to get the public more engaged or interested in the scientific visualization (such as providing a task). Our project team wrote two academic papers to share our findings (listed below). Taken together, these studies and publications contribute new knowledge that can be used by those creating usable visualizations or communicating advances in marine microbiology. Providing a case study for the benefits of multidisciplinary development of visualizations As the amount of scientific data grows, so do the number of visualizations needed to make discoveries from this data. Producing and interpreting visualizations will be an increasingly critical skill for both scientists and the general public. But creating visualizations that can be understood and used by the public has several challenges, requiring significant computer science, cognitive, and scientific expertise. The Living Liquid project addressed these challenges by forming a cross-disciplinary team. This team did not just advance the development of the exhibit. There were substantial and unanticipated training and outreach benefits for our computer science and marine microbiology partners. For example, a computer scientist from UC Davis was embedded in our development team and learned about the user-centered design process for educational tools, while our microbiology partners reported a new understanding of the applications and research on visualization. As the Living Liquid project grows from a pilot into a full development project, the team will study and document how working together in multidisciplinary groups not only benefits the educational products that the public uses, but can benefit the professionals making these products.
