Dear Data Design Exercise (was Online Discussion 14)

Instead of Online Discussion 14, I am going to ask you to do a design exercise.

You will turn it in as Online Discussion 14: Dear Data Design Exercise - the initial posting is due on Friday. I do hope that you’ll try to give feedback and critique to others after that!

The exercise is based on the book Dear Data. I’ve done variants of the exercise in class for a few years - it’s always fun and inspiring. This year, we don’t have time in class, so we’ll try parts of it as an “at-home” design exercise.

Dear Data was a project where two designers sent each other hand-drawn visualizations each week. Each week they picked a “design problem” and came up with data and solutions independently.

From a visualization pedagogy point of view, these are interesting for a number of reasons:

1. They picked “simple” design problems - simple enough to collect data and draw, but complex enough to be interesting.

2. The problems are of general interest.

3. We have two separate solutions - each designer created her own.

4. The designs are well documented: they describe their encodings on the back of the post-card (how to read the design).

5. The designs are artistic - they are often fanciful, and the goal was as much to explore nice-looking designs as it was to create things that were effective at some particular task.

6. Many of them are highly multi-variate.

7. There is a large variety of unusual encodings.

These are very different kinds of designs that we typically look at (or create) in class. They are quite artistic, and almost never use a “standard” design. I’m not sure there is a standard chart in the 104 designs in the book (52 weeks * 2 designs per week).

But I find them really inspiring - they are artistic creation from good designers who are focusing on the communicate in an engaging way aspect (that we typically ignore). Many of the designs are really attractive.

In class what we usually do:

1. Go over the basic story of what these are

2. Look at one or two and critique them (as a class)

3. Critique/Redesign one as a class

4. Have everyone critique/redesign one (we divide class into groups of 3 - so each group has 1 person get one design)

5. We discuss in groups

This doesn’t work as well at home, so we’ll pretty much skip to step 4.

The Assignment

Please do all the steps…

1. Look over the webpage to get a sense of the range of designs they did. Pick one or two to look at carefully to understand the design.

2. Look at the Negative Thoughts to S design (it is “S” because it was made by Georgia and send to Stephanie). It’s one of my favorites. Try to think about it as a critique.

3. Pick one of the three designs listed below and make a posting to Online Discussion 14: Dear Data Design Exercise with:

   • A list of a few tasks you might want to do with the data (if you were thinking in terms of a conventional visualization)
   • A brief critique (a few sentences) of how the design fits those tasks
   • Your own redesign (it’s a sketch - you can “fake the data”) that tries to convey the data (and ideally address some of your tasks) using a traditional design as possible. The goal is effectiveness, use of standard designs, and Tufte minimalism (the last one is optional). Explain what tasks you think your design is good for.
   • A second redesign (again, a sketch) - that tries to balance appeal and effectiveness. Here, you can try to explore non-standard and artistic encodings.

4. After the deadline, give some feedback to others in your group!

The key part is to create the 2 redesigns (one “as standard as possible” and the other trying you hand at artistic encoding). Be sure to include the two pictures in your posting!

You can take some liberties in the data. Try to remain faithful to the design, but you cannot actually know the specific details of the data. You also may leave off (or add) extra attributes (if you look carefully, you’ll see the pairs of designs often differ in the data attributes they display). But try to remain faithful to the design.

The three choices you may consider for redesigning (I recommend you look at all three - even though you only pick one to critique/redesign):

1. Doors
2. Media
3. Sounds

Assessment…

Note: we are not going to try to grade your artistic skill! However, we do expect you to at least try to create designs. Your designs should show your understanding of encoding principles and your ability to critique (even self-critique). If you find yourself limited by your ability to draw, do the best you can and explain what you were trying to create.

This exercise will count both as your Online Discussion 14, as well as part of the participation grade.