Design Exercises

The design exercises (at home) given over the course of the semester.

Grading of the ATUS Visualization Assignments

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This grading “rubric” is for Design Exercise 9: Visualization Hand-Ins. If you turned in question ideas (for DE7) and drafts (for DE8), we asssume that they were acceptable (if not, it will probably show in your final visualizations). Similarly, we are not doing close assessment of the critiques of the critiques (DE8b) - except in a very small number of cases, the critiques were at least acceptable. General Strategy Grading was done in two passes: Read more…

Proposal Feedback

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Rather than giving limited feedback on each proposal, I am providing overall feedback based on what I saw. Effectively, you can see the feedback that I give to everyone. There is a page of comments that apply to all themes, as well as some more theme-specific comments. The numbered items are things that at least one project made me think of. For each project, I picked a few (but it isn’t necessarily exhaustive - I didn’t pick all the comments that apply). Read more…

Design Exercise 8B: Critique

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In Design Exercise 8: Telling Stories from the ATUS data set, each student turned in a draft of their work for Design Exercise 9: Visualization Hand-Ins. For “DE8B” we will all provide critiques to each other in order to help improve the designs for the final. How it will work Shortly after the (strict) deadline for DE08: Story Building, we will place the submitted designs into a directory on Canvas: https://canvas. Read more…

Project Themes

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This folder lists the possible themes for the “final project” (the last phases of the design exercise). Each team must pick one of the themes for their project. Read formatted page...

Design Exercise 10: Project Proposal

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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). Read more…

Design Exercise 9: Visualization Hand-Ins

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Last week, you made rough drafts of the visualizations to turn in this week. This week you turn them in. The timing of things is altered a bit to allow for peer critique. Hopefully you got good feedback (if you didn’t you might want to come to office hours). The deadline for this handin is set for Friday, not Tuesday, so you have more time to think about the feedback you have gotten. Read more…

Design Exercise 8: Telling Stories from the ATUS data set

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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. Read more…

Design Exercise 7: Exploratory Data Analysis with the ATUS data

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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). Read more…

Design Exercise 6: Arrivals

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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.

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Design Exercise 5: Aid Data Handin

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This is the “end” of the Aid Data design exercise: you turn in your designs. Handins will be via Canvas DE05: Revised Designs (due Tue, Oct 18) Given the feedback you’ve received (both the direct feedback from DE4, but also seeing examples in class as well as other students assignments), hopefully you can improve your designs to make something great that you can turn in now. What to hand in Note: As in Design Exercise 3: A Design Problem, you are turning in static pictures (as PDFs). Read more…

Design Exercise 4: Critiques and Experiments

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Note: the instructions have changed slightly. You get 1 number, and use it to figure out which others to review.

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).

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Design Exercise 3: A Design Problem

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We have extended this assignment by 1 day - it is now due: DE03: Designs for Questions (due Wed, Oct 5). Some clarifications: You may use either version of the data set at AidData data set. Do not use the “original” version available elsewhere on the web. There are some data cleaning issues (the same purpose might appear with a slightly different names, the codes seem to be correct). It is a valid strategy to try to put multiple visualizations into one visualization (this was even mentioned in the original assignment as a way to come up with initial designs). Read more…

Design Exercise 2: Critique Practice

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The goal of this exercise is to give you some practice at critiquing visualizations, and thinking about how that critique can help lead to better designs. This exercise builds on Design Exercise 1: Questions from Visualizations and Data - so if you haven’t done that yet, you should. Reading this assignment might skew your thinking on that one. When writing out critiques, it feels excessive to frame them in the “if the goal is X then Y” format - but I want you to take the time to do that. Read more…