The Week in Vis 02 (Mon, Sep 7-Fri, Sep 11): Why Visualize?

in Weeks in Vis

Week number 2…

We’ve made it through week 1, and done all of the different parts of class (except for design challenges). If you didn’t do week 1’s seek and find, online discussion, or survey, please do it (better late than never).

Readings 02: Why Visualize? This week has more readings than usual. There are some for before class on Wednesday (or really, before your first discussion post), some for before class on Friday, and some to read after wednesday’s class (since I’ll help put them in context with the lecture). This week is unusual is there are the readings (on critique practice) to read before Friday’s class.

As I mentioned, there is a “driving question” for each week. The question for this week is “Why Visualize?”

Last week, we asked the question “What is Visualization?” And my answer was “a picture that helps someone do something.” The follow up question “Why would you do that?” There’s a simple version of the answer “because a picture can help that someone do the something.” But that exposes the real why questions: Why can “pictures” help people do things? Why might we think that a picture is a good choice?

Short version: There are things that visualizations are particularly good at doing. And there are perceptual and cognitive reasons why visualizations are good at helping people with tasks. The work this week will drill deeper into that. We’ll look at some things visualizations can “do” (in terms of helping people with tasks), as well as some of the cognitive and perceptual reasons why they are so good at helping. We should begin to see why visualization can be a good choice (i.e., why choose visualization and not something else).

Much of this week is to set up for deeper explorations in the future.

Another piece this week is to get at some of the “how will we learn about visualization” by learning about critique and redesign. This is a generally useful skill - but not one that we usually explicitly talk about. We’ll have some readings to get you to think about critique and redesign, and an in class conversation and exercise to get some practice with our critique skills.

Hopefully, last week you figured out the basic class mechanics. This week, we’ll start our “normal schedule” (discussion posts due Tuesday/Friday, Seek and Find do Friday, Survey at the end of the week, readings, …). There is still no design challenge yet… They will be coming soon enough.