In-Class-Exercise 1 Recap (video)

On Friday, we had In-Class Exercise 1: a simple design exercise to get you started with thinking about visualization design.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time, so I didn’t get to discuss what we did, and connect it to the lessons I wanted you to learn. I tried to race through some of the material at the end, but that didn’t work so well.

As an experiment, I created a video “mini-lecture” that tries to convey the post-exercise summary. You can see the video here on Kaltura MediaSpace. I have also uploaded the slides for this to Canvas.

Watching me talk about it is not as good as actually going through the exercise with real examples in class, but hopefully it will help you get the main points.

The big lessons:

• There are lots of possible designs, be willing to explore!
• Understand designs from building blocks, so we don’t have to name every design.
• Consider abstraction (we’ll talk about it in Week 3), which helps us think about data and tasks without the specifics.
• Think in terms of encodings (we talk about them in Week 4), which are the visual building blocks of visualizations.
• Certain encodings (basic designs) match certain tasks and data types.