A few years ago, I went back to try to formally state the learning goals for this class. Initially, I thought this was just University paperwork, but after a while, I appreciated it as a good way to think what the class is really about and why we are doing the things we are doing.

From the Official University Syllabus (phrased as outcomes – these are high level and a bit abstract, but still relevant):

1. Students will understand the potential of effective data visualization.
2. Students will understand the key principles for the design of effective visualizations.
3. Students will be able to design and evaluate data visualizations for a variety of tasks.
4. Students will understand the relevant basics of visual perception and its role in design.
5. Students will understand some standard visualization methods and their applicability, and have exposure to standard kinds of data interpretation problems and their standard solutions,
6. Students will gain exposure and practice with some of the skills required to be a researcher and practitioner in the field of Visualization.

Making this more concrete, we will teach students to:

1. Understand what visualization is in the broad sense, with an emphasis on task and effectiveness.
2. Appreciate the potential for visualization, what it is good for (and not).
3. Perform design critique, especially for visualizations, but as a general skill.
4. Understand basic design process, and use it for visualization.
5. Appreciate visualization design in terms of its building blocks, and use this approach to design, redesign, and evaluate visualizations.
6. Understand common challenges encountered in creating visualizations, and have a sense of the existing strategies for addressing them.
7. Apply common design principles, and intuitions of how the pieces can be fit together, to design visualizations.
8. Appreciate the approaches to implementation, and select among the choices.
9. Appreciate how the ideas of visualization are used in practice.
10. Have a sense of what visualization research is.

Weekly goals

Below are learning goals for the specific “week topics”. These don’t necessarily include some of the over-arching goals like “Design and assess visualizations given a specific task” which kind of happen spanned over the weeks.

Week 1: Welcome

1. Understand the design of the course and how the class will work
2. Understand what we mean by visualization and its goals

Week 2: Why Vis

1. Understand potential reasons for choosing visualizations (its benefits)
2. Appreciate the importance of design in creating visualizations
3. Apply critique practice for understanding design and redesign

Week 3: Abstraction

1. Appreciate the value of data and task abstraction in visualization design
2. Create abstract data descriptions in order to design proper visual representations
3. Apply task analysis to identify design goals and requirements for visualization
4. Appreciate the uses and problems of task taxonomies from the research literature

Week 4: Encodings

1. Understand the basic visual variables and encodings
2. Analyze and critique visualizations by breaking them into basic encodings
3. Design (generate) visualizations by assembling encodings (and predict effectiveness)

Week 5: Implementation

1. Appreciate the range of tools available for creating visualizations
2. Choose appropriate tools for different types of design challenegs
3. Be aware of different available tools

Week 6