#428: Speculative Interaction Geography: Imagining How Embodied Interactions Take Shape Beyond AI Prediction

Recent advances in qualitative data visualization are expanding how researchers and educators analyze interactions among people and things across learning environments. Yet, these tools remain primarily retrospective, representing what has already occurred from data such as video. Bridging traditions of interaction analysis with research centering affect and speculative design, this paper explores how qualitative data visualization tools can also serve as speculative instruments for creating data to imagine possible interactions in learning spaces. Specifically, we extend a method called interaction geography through two illustrative cases that demonstrate new technical capabilities. These capabilities enable researchers and practitioners to sketch imagined interactions and spatial configurations, reconfiguring interaction geography as both an analytic and speculative practice. We propose the notion of speculative interaction geography and show how speculative data visualization can serve as a human-centered counterpoint to AI-driven prediction in the learning sciences, with implications for areas like teacher education and participatory design.