De07: Critiquing Census Data Stories

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Design Exercise
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In this design exercise, you will critique other students’ designs from DE06: One Data Set, Four Stories (Census Data Edition). This will give you practice at doing critique, and provide feedback to your peers (you will receive the feedback on your designs).

In this design exercise, we will share designs from all students in class. We will share 2 designs from every student (including you). We will ask each student to critique 6 designs from other students.

Your critiques will be given to the designers. You will write 6 critiques - for 6 different designs, each made by a classmate. You will also receive 6 critiques.

We will send the critiques verbatim to the creators of the designs.

Your grade is on your critiques - not on the designs you are critiquing. This means that whether or not the design is good, you need to write a “good” critique (a good critique may not be a positive critique).

Note: these critiques are not factored into the designer’s grade. The course staff will be doing the design assessment independently.

The learning goals of this assignment:

  1. Provide practice at doing critique. In particular, for a similar kind of design that students have made recently.
  2. Give a chance to reinforce the principles that went into the designs that students made recently (by critiquing similar designs).
  3. Provide critiques (so students can get feedback on their work).
  4. See a set of critiques of students own work, so student can see how different critiques work (or not).

While there is a Canvas assignment for this assignment Design Exercise 07: Critiques (due Fri, Oct 25), you will actually upload your critiques to a google form (Coming Soon). The due date is soft: however, the hard cutoff (Monday, October 28th) is a hard deadline: we want to return the critiques to the designers!

Mechanics

We will select 2 designs by each student - one will be place in group A, and the other in group B (so each student will have 1 design in each group). Note: the course staff will choose the 2 designs from the 4 you submitted

Each student will be assigned a number.

The designs will be available in two folders on Canvas: DE7 group A designs (coming soon) DE7 group B designs (coming soon). Each design will be numbered (so you can see yours by looking at your number).

Each student is responsible for critiquing 6 other designs. The 3 “next” designs from group A, and the 3 “previous designs” from group B. Next and Previous are modulo 69 (the number of students in class),

If I am student 67, I need to critique designs 68, 69, and 1 from group A (the next 3), and 66, 65, and 64 (from group B). If I am student 2, I need to critique designs 3,4 and 5 from group A and 1, 69 and 68 from group B.

Write your critiques as plain text. We will upload them using a google form. (Coming Soon) The form will ask you which design you are critiquing, what your number is, and have a type-in box for you to upload your critique. (we recommend you write the text ahead of time).

There is a single type-in box for your critique. If you want to give “multiple critiques” (for example, to critique a number of individual elements), put them all together. You can use titles or spacing to help keep them separate.

Note: it is very important that you complete your reviews by the cutoff. If you don’t we cannot send the feedback to the designer. (and, we will penalize your grade).

Note: if you want to critique more designs, feel free. Please choose the next/previous (so in the example, if I were 67, I would critique #2 from A and 63 from B, and then 3 from A, etc.). We may give kudos for students who do extra critiques, but only if they are high quality. Providing extra critiques is a way to help your classmates. Extra critiques are optional!

Hints

As you write, consider what kind of critique you would like to receive. Here are some ways of thinking about critique.

  1. What criticism might help the designer understand places where the design is successful/unsuccessful? What criticism might help them improve this design (if they were going to iterate on it)? This can include good elements (things to keep) or bad elements (things to try to address). Avoid being prescriptive: your goal isn’t to prescribe a better design - it is to help the designer understand the problems and to (possibly) expose alternative choices and ways of thinking.

  2. What criticism might help the designer in the future? What is particularly good (or bad) about the design that they should make sure to keep doing with future designs.

  3. What criticism might help other designers learn to make designs for similar situations? What good (or bad) elements expose principles that designers should keep in mind? How can we learn from this design?

We are aware that some designs are easier to critique than others. Good designs are often harder to critique than bad ones, although some bad ones are so bad it’s hard to know where to start. This is why you get to critique 6 different designs. Statistically, we expect everyone to have a mix of good/bad, easy/hard.

You do not need to follow the stylized form that we discussed in class (that comes from the Discussing Design reading), but I recommend using something like it: it will help you from making some of the worst critiquing mistakes.