Design Exercises (List Page)

The intent of this design exercise is to give you some experience making visualizations for different types of data: using glyph visualizations for high dimensional points, using set visualizations for set comparisons, and using network visualizations. We can apply all of these to the Flight Delay Data Set.

Note: This is a “double” design exercise (6-1 and 6-2 are put together into one). The entire thing will be turned in as one Canvas Survey Design Exercise 6-1: Design Exercise 6-1: Glyphs and Graphs and Sets.

This is the second part of Design Exercise 5. The first part (Design Exercise 5-1: Experiment with the Flight Data) asked students to make some exploratory visualizations. In this part of the exercise, we ask students to make two “high quality” visualizations that tell good stories. For each, we ask for an “alternate” version that provides a different design to tell the same story.

In Design Exercise 5 (which is split into two parts, this DE 5-1, and Design Exercise 5-2: Visualizations from the Flight Data), you will work with another tabular data set: Flight Delay Data. In DE 5-1, you will sketch a visualization to get you thinking about the data, and then make some basic exploratory visualizations to get a sense of how to work with the data and what is there. In Design Exercise 5-2: Visualizations from the Flight Data you will try to make visualizations to tell stories.

In this Design Exercise, we are asking you to make good visualizations that tell interesting stories (answer questions) from the data sets we have been working with. You have 2 weeks to make 6 visualizations (subject to some requirements). You will also be asked to critique someone else’s visualization.

You will turn this assignment in on the Canvas Survey Design Exercise 4-2: Visualizations from 2 data sets (due Fri, Oct 24).

The regular Design Exercise is folded into Design Exercise 4-2: 2 Data Sets, 6 Visualizations. This part (4-1 Drafts) is optional. We will not grade this part - but completing it might help you do better on the part that does count.

How this works: If you turn in drafts of your designs by the deadline (which is not the end of the module) with the survey Design Exercise 4-1: OPT-IN: DE4 Drafts (due Fri, Oct 17), we will connect you with other students to do peer critique - hopefully you will be able to help one another do better visualizations and get some experience with critique.

In this exercise, you will make visualizations using the data sets provided at A Tale of Two Data Sets. These visualizations are meant to be “exploratory” - we are asking you to create visualizations that might expose interesting stories (so you can make more focused visualizations that tell the specific stories in the future).

In this exercise, we will ask you to make some visualizations using the data sets on A Tale of Two Data Sets. The goal here is to give you some practice making visualizations and working with the data (you will do more work with it in subsequent assignments). A secondary goal is for you to think about appropriate uses of different visualizations types.

In this exercise, you will be making some initial looks at the two data sets we’ll be working with for the first weeks of class. We’ll ask you to think about the data and sketch some ideas. Note: we are not asking you to make visualizations using computer tools (we want you to sketch).

In this design exercise we give you a chance to critique some visualizations to practice your critique skills. We would like you to use the stylized form described in class and in the readings. Because we haven’t learned that many “principles” in class, use your intuitions - what does the visualization make easy for you to see (or not see)?

In this second design exercise, we’ll look at some visualizations and try to figure out why the designer chose the specific designs. The goal is to build intuitions about task and effectiveness in visualizations. You will turn in your answers to questions about the visualizations on Canvas as Design Exercise 1-2: Why These Charts? (due Fri, Sep 12).

In our first design exercise we’ll look at some different visualizations of the same data set and you’ll try to figure out what each one might be good for. The goal of this exercise is to build intuitions about task and effectiveness in visualizations. You will turn in your answers to questions about the visualizations on Canvas as Design Exercise 1-1: What can you see? (chart comparison) (due Fri, Sep 12)