Swarm Systems in the Visualization of Consumption Patterns / 2466
Catarina Maçãs, Pedro Cruz, Pedro Martins, Penousal Machado
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Information Aesthetics is an emerging sub-field of Data Visualization that aims to engage the viewers and lure them into decode the visualization. The introduction of self-organising systems can aid the creation of these visual representations through the exploration of emergent patterns. In this paper, we apply a swarm based system as a method to create emergent visualizations of data that convey meaningful information in an inciting way, exploring the boundaries between Data Visualization and Information Aesthetics. The approach is used to visually convey the consumption patterns in 729 Portuguese hypermarkets over the course of two years. The analysis of the experimental results focuses on the ability of the emergent visualizations to communicate information while engaging the viewer with organic visuals.