Design Exercise 5: Aid Data Handin

in Design Exercises

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). You should turn in one PDF with a design per question. The files should be named “1.pdf” and “2.pdf”. Each should be a single page.

We have higher expectations for these visualizations than the drafts turned in as part of DE3. We expect that some students will “sketch” (create the visualization by hand), and this may not totally accurately reflect the data. Other students may write programs that build visualizations from the actual data. (or, you might draw by hand based on computations from the data, or …). We will try to account for all of this (e.g., if you sketch, you need to excel through creative design).

For each design, you should create a single page PDF that answers the following questions:

  1. Given a brief rationale for your design. What choices have you made? Is there something we need to know to interpret it?
  2. How have you adapted your initial design based on the feedback that you have gotten?
  3. How did you make it (tell us the specific tools - especially if you did some programming). How faithful is your design to the actual data? (this might be anything from “it’s completely a sketch based on my impressions from a quick look at the data” to “it was computed from the actual data” or anything in between - please be specific)

In addition, we want you to turn in one more page (as a plain text file “interact.txt”, this one should not have any identification of the student on it), answering the following questions:

  1. If we asked you to create an interactive version of this assignment, do you think you are well enough prepared for the programming aspects? (as in, do you think you know enough about building an interactive visualization that you would be able to try doing it)
  2. If we asked you to create an interactive version of this assignment, what tools would you use (languages and libraries)?

We aren’t going to grade you on these answers (to the interaction questions) - we’re trying to get a sense of how feasible it would be to give an interactive visualization programming assignment. We’re going to put the answers in a big pile and get a sense of what the class could do. The answers are not anonymous (we will check that people did it), but when we consider the “pile” we won’t look at which answer came from which person (that why you shouldn’t put your name in the file).

Turning things in

You will turn things in on canvas: DE05: Revised Designs (due Tue, Oct 18)

You will upload 5 files (named as follows):

  • 1.pdf - your design that addresses question 1 - it must be a single page PDF
  • 1-discussion.pdf - a single page that answers the discussion points for your design for question 1
  • 2.pdf - your design that addresses question 2 - it must be a single page PDF
  • 2-discussion.pdf - a single page that answers the discussion points for your design for question 2
  • interact.txt - a TXT file that answers the questions

Evaluation

We will give you a grade based on:

  1. The quality of your initial designs for DE3.
  2. The quality of your critiques for DE4.
  3. The quality of your final designs (DE5).
  4. The quality of your rationale and ability to incorporate feedback (DE5)