In a multi-year visualization design study, we created and evaluated a set of visual decision-support tools centered around occupancy data for stakeholders in facilities management and planning. Ocupado uses WiFi devices as a proxy for human presence, capturing location-based counts that preserve privacy without trajectories.

The interactive visualization system bikesharingatlas.org supports the explorative data analysis of more than 460 bike-sharing networks worldwide. Being increasingly digitized, these networks nowadays produce data that can reveal interesting insights, not only into patterns of bicycle usage but also underlying spatio-temporal dynamics of a city.

We introduce the notion of a data-first design study which is triggered by the acquisition of real-world data instead of specific stakeholder analysis questions. We propose an adaptation of the design study methodology framework to provide practical guidance and to aid transferability to other data-first design processes.