Readings 11: Design

in All Readings

This week, we are making a list-minute change of topics: rather than what I thought we were going to talk about (we’ll discuss color next week)… we are going to talk about design and its relationship to the project. And a bit about uncertainty - since it relates to the project as well (and we have no other time to read about it).

Less reading than usual so we can focus on the project and design exercise.

For Design

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.

It’s not hard to find things to read about design. You can look just about anywhere. But finding something that is short and that you can learn quickly from is hard.

So, there is no required reading. You need to read something. And tell your classmates about it in the discussion. You can search the web for some web page, or try to find a magazine article, or… You can pick something specific (like how to choose fonts) or general. Or you can pick the things I list here. A warning: I will use Williams’ book in class, so you need to pick something else for the discussion assignment.

(both of these are listed in Books on Design)

I really like these basic lessons of 4 basic principles from Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. It will be the basis of the lectures. 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). They are all in The Design Readings Folder.

The book “Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty” seems to be exactly what would be appropriate for class: a book trying to teach design principles to computer scientists. I like the book (although I haven’t read the whole thing closely). And, it is available online through the UW library. I have put 2 relevant chapters into The Design Readings Folder.

For Uncertainty Visualization

Unfortunately, I had to cut the deep exploration of uncertainty visualization from the class (to add time for design and the project focus). It should have been a whole week topic with a big reading. Instead, I will ask you to look at one thing - and we might not talk about it. It will be very relevant if you want to work on Theme 4 for your project (Theme4: Part Whole Distributions). But it will be very useful to know about in general: conveying uncertainty is an important challenge that comes up a lot in the kinds of visualizations we often make as scientists.

  • (required)  [1] Lace Padilla, Matthew Kay, and Jessica Hullman. 2021. Uncertainty Visualization. In Wiley StatsRef: Statistics Reference Online. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 1–18. (DOI) (PsyArXiv)