The Week in Vis: Week 5 (Sep 28-Oct 2)

This week we’ll conclude our module on Building blocks by looking at more examples and using critique to understand how the encodings work together to serve tasks. We’ll use Wednesday’s lecture to look ahead at the next module and discuss implementation. At the end of the week, Design Exercise 1: Sketching Solutions to Real Data Problems is due - asking you to sketch designs. And Anonymous Survey 1: Attitudes and Preferences will give you an opportunity for you to provide us feedback on how the class is working.

This is the third week of Module 1: Building Blocks.

There is no new reading for this week, in order to give you more time to do the design exercise.

Design Exercise 1: Sketching Solutions to Real Data Problems is due Friday October 2. This exercise gives you the opportunity to create designs (by sketching) for questions around two data sets.

The future DEs will involve actually creating visualizations that really use the data (using whatever tools you like). This DE is a little “smaller” in that it’s only sketching (although it asks you to make a lot of visualizations).

For DEs, I wanted a cycle of feedback: you make something, you receieve (and give) feedback, you iterate and make something better (or, have more confidence in what you’ve done). For this assignment, that strategy doesn’t apply that well, so we’ll apply it in a different way.

If you turn your DE1 in on time, we will give you some feedback so that you can resubmit before the cutoff. For this DE, resubmission will not involve peer review. However, we might not provide “direct” feedback on all assignments: but we’ll talk about designs in class (the following week) which may give you ideas on how to improve yours.

There is also Anonymous Survey 1: Attitudes and Preferences (due Fri, Oct 02). Remember, even though these surveys are anonymous, we still keep track of who completes them.