The Week in Vis 2 (Sep 12-16): Why Vis?

in Weeks in Vis

This is our first full week of class (September 12-16). Hopefully, you will get used to the Rhythm. This week will follow the “usual” pattern. The week “starts” the Friday before with the “week in Vis”. This weekly message goes out as a Canvas Announcement, but also appears on the course web at The Week in Vis 2 (Sep 12-16): Why Vis?.

This week, will be a bit of a broad subject intro, and then we’ll get into “design process”.

Hopefully, last week you figured out the basic class mechanics. If you haven’t done last weeks’ assignments, please do them first. See The Week in Vis: Week 01. For now, we’ll accept things late (since some students joined the class late). After this week we’ll expect you to do things on time.

Last week, we asked the question “What is Visualization?” And my answer was “a picture that helps someone do something.” The follow up question “Why would you do that?” There’s a simple version of the answer “because a picture can help that someone do the something.” But that exposes the real why questions: Why can “pictures” help people do things? Why might we think that a picture is a good choice?

Short version: There are things that visualizations are particularly good at doing. And there are perceptual and cognitive reasons why visualizations are good at helping people with tasks. We’ll look at examples of why this is the case, and we’ll need to learn about how we learn from examples.

The work this week will drill deeper into that. We’ll look at some things visualizations can “do” (in terms of helping people with tasks), as well as some of the cognitive and perceptual reasons why they are so good at helping. We should begin to see why visualization can be a good choice (i.e., why choose visualization and not something else). Unfortunately, we won’t get to talk/read about perception and cognition for a bit (too much to read already) - it was too much to cram into a week. Hopefully it will motivate you for topics later in the class.

On Monday in class, we’ll do an in-class exercise. Be prepared to draw.

On Wednesday, we’ll talk about the reasons for doing visualizations - with some big asides to talk about some “history” (like giving you some context about Tufte). Preview: we’ll use Tufte as an example of how not to learn about visualizations.

Another piece this week is to get at some of the “how will we learn about visualization” by learning about critique and redesign. This is a generally useful skill - but not one that we usually explicitly talk about. We’ll have some readings to get you to think about critique and redesign. The following week (Monday, Sep 19), we’ll have an in-class exercise to practice critique.

Also due at the beginning of the following week (Tuesday, Sep 20): our first “design exercise” (Design Exercise 1: Questions from Visualizations and Data) - which will ask you to think about why you might be making a visualization from data. Yes, this means that two things will be due on Tuesday.