The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
Data physicalization is a growing research field that focuses on data representation and communication through the geometry or materials of physical objects. As part of this paper, we aim to contribute to the design-centric physicalization research by presenting a systematic literature review on the topic. We have identified and included in the review 163 published and peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles with primary data on physicalization artifacts. We have analyzed the sources from the point of view of conceptual and practical design elements. The results provide an insight into the state-of-the art research on design elements in data physicalization. This review is especially relevant for design and art researchers interested in the field of physicalizations.