The EnviroMapper Toolkit: an Input Physicalisation that Captures the Situated Experience of Environmental Comfort in Offices

Abstract: The environmental comfort in offices is traditionally captured by surveying an entire workforce simultaneously, which yet fails to capture the situatedness of the different personal experiences. To address this limitation, we developed the EnviroMapper Toolkit, a data physicalisation toolkit that allows individual office workers to record their personal experiences of environmental comfort by mapping the actual moments and locations these occurred. By analysing two in-the-wild studies in existing open-plan office environments (N=14), we demonstrate how this toolkit acts like a situated input visualisation that can be interpreted by domain experts who were not present during its construction. This study therefore offers four key contributions: (1) the iterative design process of the physicalisation toolkit; (2) its preliminary deployment in two real-world office contexts; (3) the decoding of the resulting artefacts by domain experts; and (4) design considerations to support future input physicalisation and visualisation constructions that capture and synthesise data from multiple individuals.