Assignments

This is another attempt to extend in-class design exercise and adapt it for a “work at home” challenge.

We did the first part of the Challenge in class. But last year, both elements of the exercise was done online. I am adapting last year’s assignment.

The design exercise has two parts: one is to consider how to design glyphs to encode high-dimensional data about restaurants; the second considers how to address a very specific task that involves collections of high dimensional data.

Part 1 of this assignment was done in class. We talked about the use of glyphs for high dimensional visualization. And you hopefully got to see some examples. Part 2 of the assignment will also be turned in as Design Exercise 7: Paris Apartments (due Mon, Nov 8).

This is a possible problem to work on for Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems): it is choice 3, Tiny Charts.

In this Design Challenge 3 Option, your task is to consider how to automatically make small versions of a standard chart type. The idea is to create a tool that would automatically “adapt” a chart to a smaller size (really, you will be generating a new chart that is effective at smaller sizes).

For Design Challenge 2, I wanted to give people a hard problem that I don’t know the answer to. In the process of deciding, I came up with 3 possible projects. Rather than me picking, I am letting each student choose for themselves.

With each, I am giving a problem that I am not sure of the solution. Your task is to explore the problem in some way and come up with some solution(s). All of the problems are open ended. There are existing solutions for special cases in the literature. But the problems leave a lot of room for creativity.

The assignment is intentionally losely specified to give students flexibility. If there is something you would like clarified, ask (preferably on Piazza). Expect updates as the project goes on.

This is a possible problem to work on for Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems): it is choice 2, dimensionality reduction viewer (embeddings).

This is a possible problem to work on for Design Challenge 2: A Visualization Project (Hard Vis Problems): it is choice 1, subgroup structure viewing.

As part of Design Challenge 1, you must critique 3 of your classmate’s designs.

Here are detailed instructions on how this will work.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the later parts of the Arrivals design exercise in class. So we’ll try to do it as an out-of-class assignment.

The arrivals exercise is designed to help motivate and give practice with the frameworks for comparison. It will be turned in as a canvas quiz: Design Exercise 5: Arrivals (due Mon, Oct 25)

This is a list of the data sets you may use for Design Challenge 1: One Dataset / Four Stories (Design Exercises 3 and 4).

You must choose one data set to create all of the visualizations in a phase. We strongly encourage you to use the same data set for phases 3 and 4.

In this assignment, you’ll pick one data set to make visualizations from. Then, you will make 4 visualizations – each telling a different “story” about the data. The idea here is that you should explore the different kinds of visualizations you might make from this data, and the different questions/tasks that you might want to show someone.

Note: this “challenge” is broken into 4 smaller phases. The last phase is bigger than the first ones, so you might want to start on it earlier.

For this second exercise, we will build on the first to actually try to make “good” visualizations. You need to pick one data set (from a list) and make two visualizations from it. We’ll ask you some questions about those visualizations to help you think about them. This is a warm up to doing it with a bigger and harder data set for the Design Challenge.

For our first “at home” design exercise, we want to make sure that you have at least tried Tableau.

The requirements are pretty minimal: all you need to do is make 2 visualizations, each one using different data. We don’t ask for anything beyond this.

You probably want to spend some time figuring out how to do things with Tableau since some real exercises with it are coming up.