Class meets Monday and Wednesday, 11:00am-12:15 in Room 1221 Computer Sciences.

1. Class attendance is required.
2. If you are going to miss class, let us know (using the Missed Class Form). Letting us know afterwards is better than nothing. If you are sick, please do not come to class.
3. Bring art supplies to class.
4. If you miss an in-class experience, you’ve missed the experience. You cannot make it up.
5. The slides are designed to be used as part of the lecture presentation - they may not make sense without watching the lecture.
6. Please come on time.

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In this class you are expected to uphold standards of professional conduct and academic integrity. The University policies on academic misconduct apply to this class.

Proper academic conduct means being honest about your work and being respectful in your communications with staff and other students.

We will have in-person class meetings (in Room 1221 Computer Sciences); we will use Canvas for announcements, discussions, and hand-ins; and we will use this course web to distribute information (we will announce new information on Canvas).

Policies Overview

• Attendance: See Class Meetings (attendance policy). You are required to attend class. If you miss an in-class-experience, you cannot make it up. If you miss class, please fill out the Missed Class Form. Bring drawing supplies.

• Parts of Class: See Parts of Class. The class consists of in class meetings (traditional lectures, group discussions, in-class-exercises), online discussions (weekly topics and seek-and-finds), surveys, and design exercises.

• Weekly Rhythm: See Weekly Rhythm. The class follows the same pattern each week.

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Your grade will depend on all aspects of class.

Canvas will not show your final grade. It will not even estimate it.

Grading in this class is challenging. The quality of a project/assignment may depend on factors beyond class topics (e.g., a student’s implementation skills), and project evaluation can be quite subjective. We do not want to assess your artistic skill or your programming abilities (from before the class).

As such, this class is designed to have a large number of small activities which, if you really do them and take them seriously, will lead to you meeting the learning objectives for the class. See the Parts of Class. If you actively participate consistently, I believe you will learn the lessons.

This class has no official pre-requisites.

You need to have graduate standing - we expect a certain level of intellectual maturity.

Importantly, you need to be willing to learn about visualization design by reading, discussing/writing, and trying small exercises. (see What Is This Class and Why?).

Attendance is part of class. This class involves in-class experiences. This requires students to be in class - if you are not in class for the in-class experience, you won’t have the in-class experience. If you know that you will miss a lot of classes, or do not intend to come to class “nearly all of the time”, please do not take the class.

I am quite aware that most LLM chat tools (ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, etc.) can write completely reasonable responses to the prompts. They tend to be a bit generic and wordy, which means that reading them uses up the time.

It is a waste of a grader’s time (or your discussion partners’ time) to read a GenAI response to a discussion prompt. We all know that the tools can generate reasonable responses without very much prompt engineering work (even I was able to get Co-Pilot to generate reasonable responses to the prompts)! By turning in generated answers, you are wasting others’ time.