Readings11: Interaction and Design

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This week, we’re combining two very different topics. Both are hard to give readings about.

There are two very different topics this week.

  1. The first is graphic design. I call it “Design School in a Day”, since we’ll see if/how we can impact your graphic design skills in a single lecture (and a design exercise).

  2. The second is interaction. It’s not that this isn’t a big and important topic - it’s just one that is hard to learn about through readings.

Graphic Design Readings

While a little bit of reading is not going to make you a designer, it can begin the process of getting you to improve. And it will give you something to practice.

It’s not hard to find things to read about design. You can look just about anywhere. But finding something that is short and that you can learn quickly from is hard.

So, there is no required reading. You need to read something. And tell your classmates about it in the discussion. You can search the web for some web page, or try to find a magazine article, or… You can pick something specific (like how to choose fonts) or general. Or you can pick the things I list here.

(both of these are listed on the design books page)

I really like these basic lessons of 4 basic principles from Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. It will be the basis of the lecture. 4 brief chapters (and a summary chapter) will give you the idea of the CARP principles (contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity). People who are good designers (and teach design) tell me this is a great place to start. I feel that learning this has helped me (and generations of students seem to agree). Yes, this is 5 chapters, but they are really short (a few pages each). They are all in The Design Readings Folder. (TheNonDesignersDesignBook1and6-Overview.pdf 0.9mb) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter2.pdf 4.8mb) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter3.pdf 4.3mb) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter4.pdf 3.5mb) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter5.pdf 4.3mb).

The book “Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty” seems to be exactly what would be appropriate for class: a book trying to teach design principles to computer scientists. I like the book (although I haven’t read the whole thing closely). And, it is available online through the UW library. I have put 2 relevant chapters into The Design Readings Folder.

But I encourage you to go beyond this and find something else to read.

Interaction

Interaction is one of those things that is best experienced, rather than read about. The readings will give you a lot of examples, and help to give you a framework for organizing your thinking around interaction. The optional reading is a really useful way to think about the tradeoffs in using interaction.

The first reading is a survey paper that provides a good way to organize many of the interactions we see in visualization, and provides lots of good examples. Two chapters of the Munzner book will formalize some of the common patterns. The optional reading is a great way to think about

  1. (required)  Interactive dynamics for visual analysis. Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 45. (pdf) (doi)

  2. (required)  Maniplate View (Chapter 11 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-11-ManipulateView.pdf 0.5mb)

  3. (required)  Facet into Multiple Views (Chapter 12 from Munzner’s Visualization Analysis & Design) (Munzner-12-FacetMultipleViews.pdf 1.0mb)

    This isn’t specific to interaction, but it fits better here than anywhere else.

  4. (optional)  Lam, H. (2008). A Framework of Interaction Costs in Information Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), 1149–1156. (doi). (Unfortunately, the “author’s free” version of this paper is gone. You can Access the official version either on campus, or using the campus proxy server EZProxy.)

    I’ll use this paper to frame the discussion in class. It provides a good “why not add interaction” point of view.