The Week in Vis 07 (Mon, Oct 15 – Fri, Oct 19): Perception and Design

by Mike Gleicher on October 11, 2018

Class Meetings
  • Mon, Oct 15 – Lecture:Perception and Design
  • Wed, Oct 17 – ICE:Design School
  • Fri, Oct 19 – OPT:D3 Tutorial
Week Deadlines

Last week we talked about evaluation, wrapped up Design Challenge 1, and talked about Design Challenge 2 – which is starting already!

This week 4 different things are going on:

  1. In lecture on Monday, we’ll talk about human perception – which is a fascinating topic, and should influence how we think about visualization design.
  2. In lecture/ICE on Wednesday, we’ll talk about graphic design. Design School in a Day? Not quite, but hopefully it will be better than nothing.
  3. Design Challenge 2 has begun! The first check point is this week!
  4. On Friday, there will be an optional tutorial on D3 – given by Florian Heimerl, a post-doc who works with me. He knows way more about D3 than me.

You may want to look at this week’s learning goals Learning Goals 7: Week 7 – Perception and Design.

Readings (due Mon, Oct 15 – preferably before class)

This week puts together two (seemingly) disparate topics: perception and (graphic) design. Both are huge topics – you could get a degree in either, but they come together in an interesting way. Perception influences all visual design, not just visualization. So they are a natural coupling.

As you read about perception, think about how it effects design. As you read about design, consider how it is motivated by perception.

Yes, this is a lot to read – but the (required) design readings are really short. It’s not really 10 readings – one is just web demos, and the design book chapters are really short.

Perception (required)

The main readings are the Ware chapters, since it’s a good introduction to the basics of perception, and its impact on design. Chapter 6 of Cairo is useful because it considers “higher level” perceptual issues. I also include Cairo Chapter 5 (as optional) because it’s redundant with Ware, but it’s fun to see his (less scientific) take on it. And look at Chris Healy’s web page to get a sense of pre-attentive effects.

I also want you to look at the Healy and Enns paper / resources. It is sufficient to look at the web survey (since it has the cool demos).

  1. Visual Queries (Chapter 1 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-1-VisualQueries.pdf 2.5mb)
  2. What We Can Easily See (Chapter 2 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-2-EasilySee.pdf 2.1mb)
  3. Structuring Two Dimensional Space (Chapter 3 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-3-StructuringSpace.pdf 2.6mb)
  4. Visualizing for the Mind (Chapter 6 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh6.pdf 8.1mb)
  5. Look at the pre-attention demos and pictures in the old version of Chris Healey’s web survey of perceptual principles for vis. The paper (optional, below) is much better in terms of explaining things – but it’s too much to require as reading.

Design (required)

Part 1 is connected to the “Design School” (posting coming). While a little bit of reading is not going to make you a designer, it can begin the process of getting you to improve. And it will give you something to practice. I really like these basic lessons of 4 basic principles from Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. These 4 brief chapters (and a summary chapter) will give you the idea of the CARP principles (contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity). People who are good designers (and teach design) tell me this is a great place to start. I feel that learning this has helped me (and generations of students seem to agree). Yes, this is 5 chapters, but they are really short (a few pages each).

Design: Optional

Part 1: It’s not hard to find things to read about design. But, if you want a little more than the first 4 principles from Williams, I think that these Chapters from Kadavy’s Design for Hackers give a nice presentation of some other basic design principles that are really hard to describe.

Perception: Optional

Perceptual science is a whole field, so we’re just touching the surface. Even just the beginnings of what is relevant to visualization. It’s hard for me not to require these…

  • The Eye and Visual Brain (Chapter 5 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh5.pdf 5.4mb) Optional – Cairo’s take on it. More based on his experience as a designer.
  • Healey, C. G., & Enns, J. T. (2012). Attention and Visual Memory in Visualization and Computer Graphics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(7), 1170–1188. (pdf) (doi)

This is a good survey of basic perception stuff that is useful for vis. In this past, this was required reading.
Warning: this survey is a little dense, but it gets the concepts across with examples. Don’t worry about the theory so much. Get a sense of what the visual system does (through the figures, and the descriptions of the phenomena), and skip over the theories of how it does it (unless you’re interested).
There is an older, online version as Chris Healy’s web survey which has lots of cool pre-attention demos. But the text in the paper is much better, and the paper includes more things.

  • Franconeri, S. L. (2013). The Nature and Status of Visual Resources. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology (pp. 1–16). Oxford University Press. (pdf) (doi)This is a survey, similar to Healey and Enns above, but written more from the psychology side. The first part, where he characterizes the various kinds of limitations on our visual system is something I’ve found really valuable. The latter parts, where he discusses some of the current theories for why these limitations happen is interesting (to me), but less directly relevant to visualization (since it is mainly trying to explain limits that we need to work around). I think these explanations may lead to new ideas for visualization – but its less direct of a path.
  • Albers, D., Correll, M., Gleicher, M., & Franconeri, S. (2014). Ensemble Processing of Color and Shape: Beyond Mean Judgments. Journal of Vision, 14(10), 1056–1056. (paper page) (doi)We (Steve, myself, and some of our students) have written a survey paper on some other things the visual system can do (and why it can matter for vis). We call it “visual aggregation” and in psychology they call it “ensemble encoding.” It might be useful to skim through for the pictures and diagrams. I will talk about this stuff (at least the work that we did) in class.

Previous post:

Next post: