Design Exercises

Understanding the nested model is really important. So, we’ll have an exercise that will force you to use it and think about how it applies to Design Exercise 10: Project Proposal (which you should be working on).

A list of submitted questions for DE7: Exploration (EDA).

For the last part of the class, we will have everyone do a “project” based on the ATUS data that we are now all familiar with. The first phase of the project is to propose a project (to be turned in as DE10 (due Tue, Nov 22)). There is actually a part before that: in class on November 16, we will have a class discussion, brainstorming session, and partner finding exercise, which means you must prepare for it by reading the project documentation (this page and some others) and completing DE10A: Project Topics Survey (due Tue, Nov 15).

Warning: the time frame for this project is very compressed. We will adjust our expectations accordingly.

Update 11/3: for DE8, you only need to turn in 3 visualizations since the “class list” is not available. class list was only made available after DE8. The final handin of DE9 will require all 4.

In this assignment, you will develop 3 visualizations, each telling a “story” from the ATUS data set.

This assignment will be turned in as DE08: Story Building (due Tue, Nov 8)

Basically, the assignment is a connection between last week’s Design Exercise 7: Exploratory Data Analysis with the ATUS data where you explored the data set to find stories and next week’s Design Exercise 9: Visualization Hand-Ins where you turn in “final” visualizations that tell the stories. This week’s handin is basically an intermediate result on the way to Design Exercise 9.

The goal here is to allow for peer critique. This means that the deadline is strict. We need your draft designs so we send them back out for peer critique.

In this assignment (actually, all the design exercises for the rest of the class), we will work with the American Time Use Survey - a data set that surveys thousands of people each year to see how they spend their time. Please read about it here: ATUS: American Time Usage Survey.

For this design exercise, we ask you to “explore” the data set. Your task is to identify interesting things in the data (that you might want to make visualizations of later). This task is Exploratory Data Analysis - and you will want to do some visualization. It’s just a different kind of visualization. You want to make quick, rough visualizations that show lots of things quickly so you can make judgements about where to did deeper or what stories to tell in more refined visualizations.

You will turn this in on canvas as DE07: Exploration (EDA) (due Tue, Nov 1).

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: DE06: Assignments (Arrivals) (due Tue, Oct 25). The Canvas Quiz will give you a point for completing the assignment. We will grade it separately.

This design exercise has two distinct parts. Both are really important as part of bigger multi-phase things, so it is important that you complete them on time.

1. You must provide critiques to your classmates on their DE3 designs.
2. You must at least try to use Tableau and make some visualization.

You will turn this in on Canvas as DE04: Critiques and Experiments (due Tue, Oct 11). Note: prepare your answers off line and then copy them into the boxes. You will also upload a picture to Canvas (of your work with Tableau).