Creative Data Visualization: Live Drawing Data From Piccles
At the 2024 AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference, Piccles founder Chris Bent had attendees draw how they felt and how proficient they were at data science. He used the results to argue that drawings capture human and emotional data, and previewed natural drawing processing.
By The AI Enterprise Magazine Team3 min read
Key takeaways
- Data is not only numbers. Bent said drawings capture expressive, human data that statistics can miss.
- Live drawing shows group sentiment. Attendees' sketches built a real-time picture of mood and data science confidence.
- Drawing prompts candor. Because drawing is unnatural for many adults, Bent said people respond more authentically.
- Natural drawing processing. His team is developing methods to interpret large sets of drawings in real time.
- Data is everywhere. A jelly bean display, ripe tomatoes and pencil use all work as informal data visualizations.
At the AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference 2024, Chris Bent, founder of Piccles, turned a virtual session into a live data collection experiment. Instead of showing slides first, Bent asked attendees to scan a QR code or click a link and draw their answers to two questions, then read the resulting pile of sketches as a data set.
Bent said the name Piccles stands for "pictures and pixels put together." His pitch was that data does not have to be numeric, and that drawings can capture human and emotional information that statistics miss.
What is creative data visualization?
Bent described it as letting people visualize their own data, a practice he said his company is pioneering. In the session, "every little brush stroke shows up in real time" on a shared screen as attendees draw.
The first question was how participants were feeling that morning. The responses ran from smiley faces to tired ones, plus suns and a landscape that Bent read as the Rocky Mountains or the Grand Tetons. One attendee mentioned dealing with 110-degree heat.
Bent said each drawing reflects the person who made it, can be traced back to its creator, and will never be recreated exactly. That, he argued, makes the response more human than a number on a scale.
What did the audience's drawings show?
The second question asked how proficient attendees felt at data science, using red for no experience, yellow for getting started and green for expert. Bent saw "a lot of Reds a lot of yellows and a lot of question marks," which he called understandable in a new field.
One drawing showed a person at the tip of an iceberg, aware of how much lay below the surface. Bent said the exercise showed newcomers they are not alone, and that "you can go from this to this" faster than they might think.
Why do people respond authentically when they draw?
Drawing is an unnatural form of expression for many adults, Bent said, so people often draw what is really on their minds rather than the image they want others to see, as they might in text or speech.
He pointed to earlier uses of the platform. A live graffiti wall in Montreal let passersby scan a QR code and answer questions, and Bent said hundreds of people took part. Meeting and event planners were asked to tell the story of their year starting in 2020. Students were asked about the worst part of virtual learning during the pandemic, and social life ranked at the top, in addition to being stuck at home.
What is natural drawing processing?
Bent said his team is developing what it calls natural drawing processing, a counterpart to natural language processing. The goal is to make sense of large numbers of drawings in real time and give an overall sense of people's emotional state.
He described an experiment in which people drew feelings ranging from shame to apathy, desire, pride, courage and enlightenment. Enlightenment came out as yellow explosions, "like fireworks," while shame appeared dark and sad.
According to Bent, Piccles now holds hundreds of thousands of drawings. He offered to make them available to people who want to experiment with them, and asked interested attendees to contact him by email or on LinkedIn.
Where else is data hiding in plain sight?
Bent argued that visual data is everywhere. At a jelly bean factory in New Zealand, he said, a display where visitors picked their favorite bags worked as an instant bar chart: black licorice went untouched while kiwi-flavored beans emptied out. He also noted that tomato color signals ripeness and that his own pencils show which colors he uses most.
He closed with a video built from students' answers to one question, how the pandemic affected them. Responses ranged from lost sports and graduations to more sleep, cooking and gardening. Bent's takeaway: one question, asked of many people, shows that "every person is experiencing the same world in different ways."
More ways to learn about data from AI Connect
AI Connect continues to run free live webinars. The 2027 schedule includes 24 free live webinars across four series: the AI x Enterprise Panel Series, AI Demo Days, Agentic AI Showcases and the Plug & Play Series. Details are at /webinars/. Registration for 2027 events is coming soon.
Frequently asked questions
What is creative data visualization?
Bent described it as letting people visualize their own data, including drawings that express feelings, rather than only charts of numbers.
What is natural drawing processing?
It is Piccles' term for making sense of many drawings in real time, as natural language processing does for text, to gauge people's emotional state.
How did Piccles collect data in the session?
Attendees scanned a QR code or clicked a link and drew answers to questions, which appeared on screen in real time.
This article is based on remarks by Chris Bent, Founder, Piccles at AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference 2024 on July 25, 2024. More coverage: More AI Connect Events.
Filed under: AI Use Cases & Applications, People, Culture & Leadership
