"I'm not alone in that battle": Designing Immersive Visualizations for Community Awareness and Connectedness

Abstract

Community connectedness is a concept used by health practitioners and researchers to understand perceptions of: support from the community, belonging and issues, and as a protective measure for many individual health outcomes. In this paper we show how immersive visualizations presented through mobile augmented reality (AR) can be used to build community awareness and connectedness. To do so, we used a Research through Design process to develop four immersive visualizations related to mental health concerns within a local university community. We then conducted a mixed-methods field experiment to examine the visualizations' impact on participants' sense of community connectedness. We show that the visualizations increased participants' sense of community connectedness and prompted them to reflect on their relationship with the university community. We then discuss opportunities for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) to further explore public health concepts like community connectedness and associated measures, as well as practical lessons on the design of AR and immersive visualization.