Grasping Data
Outputs from this project
‘Grasping Data Through Play: Exploring Co-Design Activities for Children’s Engagement with Personal Data. D Perera, D Kaufmann, A Ramírez-Duque, A Atabey, S Brewster, Cara Wilson, John Vines, Lydia Plowman, Uta Hinrichs, Andrew Manches. EuroVIS Workshop on Vis Games: Workshop on Visualization Play, Games, and Activities, 2025. https://doi.org/10.2312/visgames.20251164
Ayça Atabey, Cara Wilson, Andrew Manches, Uta Hinrichs, Stephen Anthony Brewster, Andres Alberto Ramirez, Dushani Perera, Dorsey B. Kaufmann, Ge Wang, Bernd Ploderer, Judith Good, and John Vines. 2025. Grasping Data: Exploring interdisciplinary approaches for investigating children’s interactions with their personal data. Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children. 1249–1252. https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3735579
Cara Wilson, Andrew Manches, Ayça Atabey, Uta Hinrichs, Stephen Anthony Brewster, Bernd Ploderer, and Ge Wang. 2025. Grasping Data: Mapping Out HCI Methods for Children and Young People’s Interactions with their Personal Data. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’25). Article 784, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3706726
Grasping Data bridges the fields of education and data visualization by exploring physicalization-driven methods and activities to enable young children to understand and benefit from their personal data.
The project is led by Prof Andrew Manches, Director of the Centre’s Children and Technology research strand, together with co-leads Dr. Cara Wilson and Prof. Lydia Plowman (School of Education), Dr. Uta Hinrichs, Dr. Susan Lechelt, and Prof. John Vines (School of Informatics) and Prof. Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow).
Working with young children (aged 3-10) in primary schools, in partnership with SSERC, the Edinburgh Zoo and Glasgow Science Centre, we investigate activities and technologies to enable children to construct physical representations of their own personal data that children that they can then touch, explore, talk about and learn with.
The project aims to contribute knowledge to early learning, cognitive psychology, child-centred design, data ethics, data visualization and computer science. The goal is to change perceptions about children and their personal data through the creation of cutting-edge, child-centred tools and teaching practices.
Grasping Data is one of the thirty-six successful projects of the UKRI’s cross-research council responsive mode round 1 pilot scheme, designed to stimulate exciting new interdisciplinary research.
Collaborators: Andrew Manches, Stephen Brewster, Lydia Plowman, Andres Ramirez-Duque
Partners: SSERC (https://www.sserc.org.uk), RZSS Edinburgh Zoo (https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk), Glasgow Science Centre (https://www.glasgowsciencecentre.org)
Funder: UKRI
Project dates: 2025 – 2027
