Design Exercise 2-2: Questions and Sketches

in Design Exercises (List Page)

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).

Basics

You will turn this assignment in as a Canvas Survey: Design Exercise 2-2: Questions and Sketches that is due at the end of the module (Friday, September ). Like all design exercises (hopefully, you know this by now), you will need to turn it in by the end of the Module, and when you do, Canvas will give you 87 points (since we assume that you probably did work that meets the high expectations we have of graduate students). You will upload your sketches to Canvas (you can scan them, or take a picture of them with your phone), and answer questions. Because of how Canvas works, you will probably want to prepare your answers offline and upload them all at once.

These questions are based on the two data sets described at A Tale of Two Data Sets. Each question refers to a specific data set. We recommend that you start by familiarizing yourself with the data sets. For these exercises, we aren’t asking you about the data itself - but its form. (in fact, we will ask you to imagine different possible data in some questions).

For each data set, I have made a tutorial on how to work with it in Tableau (Tableau Census Walkthrough, Tableau Life Expectancy Walkthrough), and Cat has made a tutorial on how to work with it in Python with standard libraries (Seaborn, Plotly). Even though you don’t need to know how to work with the data, these tutorials might give you some ideas and examples of visualizations made with these data sets.

We are asking you to “sketch” - we intend this to be by hand (pencil and paper), but you can use digital tools. We do not intend for you to use real data - you should imagine what you think the data might be like. In fact, for some questions we ask you to imagine different data (as a way to see what your design might do under different situations).

Because you are sketching, we are also asking that you describe your sketch to make it clear what it is. This is also a chance to practice describing things in terms of abstractions and encodings.

Question 1,2,3 - A simple question, one visualization, two answers

We’ll start with a “simple” question to make a visualization for. There is a “standard answer” (which is OK), but consider what designs might be effective.

Design a visualization that contrasts how the unemployment rates have changed across the three different levels of “urbanness” (urban, sub-urban, rural) have changed over the years (2000-2019). Sketch your design two ways: (1) imagining that there are interesting differences in the patterns between the levels and (2) imagining that the trends are similar across the three levels. Question 3 will ask you to explain your designs.

Remember: we are asking you to sketch, which means you need to imagine the data. You may not be an expert in unemployment rates in the US. That’s OK - you can imagine something. But, for this example, we want you to imagine that there is a difference in the patterns (for question 1) and a counter-pattern (similar trends) (for question 2). The goal is to use this “data imagination” to see how the design is effective at showing that there are (or are not) differences in the trends between the levels.

A bit about the actual data

The data set labels each county with a “Rural-Urban Continuum” code for each county. There are 9 levels (this is ordinal, not interval), but you can assume they are grouped into 3 levels (again, ordinal, not interval): 1=urban, 2=suburban,3=rural.

The data set provides unemployment rates for every year from 2000-2022. We’re going to stop at 2019 (since 2020 unemployment is weird because of the pandemic).

In Canvas, there are three questions:

  1. Upload your sketch of your design with “data” where there is a difference in the trends.
  2. Upload your sketch of your design with “data” where the trends are similar.
  3. (a) Explain your design in terms of how the variables and encoded. (a few sentences), and (b) explain how your design makes it easy to see the differences between the data in 1 and 2.
Aside: Why this would be tricky in Tableau (or other tools)

Remember: we are asking you to sketch, not to make an actual picture from the data. To actually make this picture correctly is a bit tricky.

Problem 1: To compute the unemployment rate in for a group of counties (e.g., the counties with each urban/rural level), you cannot simply average the rates in the different counties. Some counties have lots of people, some have very few. You could do this with a weighted average (weighting each county by its size). Or you could compute the rates by summing the number of unemployed people and the total population for each level, and then find the ratio for each.

Problem 2: Because each year is a separate variable (or measure in Tableau), making many kinds of graphs requires putting a list of measures together. This is trickier than it should be in Tableau.

These problems are beyond basic Tableau skills (or at least my skills). This is a case where I probably would have written a script to re-organize the data in a format that would make things easy for Tableau.

Question 4,5,6 - A Harder Question

The data includes how many people migrate to each county (this is split into domestic and international migration). It also has the education levels and employment levels (numbers and rates).

Your task is to explain the kinds of places people migrate to. Do they go do places where there are jobs (low unemployment, or a large existing workforce)? Do they go to places where the existing population is more or less educated? Do they go to more rural or urban areas?

Note: you probably want to consider this in terms of rates. And you may not be able to consider all possible relationships at once.

Again, you are sketching, so you get to “make up” the data. Imagine that there are interesting patterns to find, so that they come out in your designs.

For this task, create two different visualizations. Try to imagine similar data, but create two different visual designs that emphasize different aspects of the data.

Upload your designs as Questions 4 and 5. For question 6, describe your two designs and what you can see in each. How do the designs differ to make different things easy to see?

Question 7,8,9 - Biggest Changes in Life Expectancies

With the Worldwide Life Expectancy Data…

Let’s consider the countries with the largest improvements over the time period where we have complete data (1950-2021). In the tutorial, I made something showing this (that was simple, but hard to implement in Tableau). Of course, this is only part of the story.

Create a design that shows that the biggest improvements don’t necessarily lead to the longest life expectancies (i.e., the biggest improvements were in places that were bad to begin with). You want to show where things ended up, but in a way that emphasizes how they got there.

Even describing the possibilities might bias how you think about this… but there are lots of things to possibly show. You might highlight the largest changes, or the diversity of changes, or the correlation, or …

Imagine the data. And then sketch 2 different designs that “tell stories” about the relationship between amount of change and where things end up.

Turn in the designs as questions 7 and 8. For question 9, describe your designs, and explain what each one makes easy to see (the story it is designed to tell).

Question 10,11,12 - Progress in Life Expectancies

In the previous questions, I asked about the overall change. But, progress probably doesn’t happen uniformly. There are probably periods of faster and slower advances. Each country might have a distinct trend, or there might be periods where all parts of the world experience similar things.

Question 10: List 5 questions about this (trends in progress) that could (1) be answered by the data and (2) could be answered with a visualization. Each question should be a sentence. Please provide it as a numbered list.

Question 11: Pick one of those questions and sketch a visualization that “answers” it.

Question 12: Explain the encodings of your visualization, and how it makes the answer to the question “easy to see”. (it should be clear which of the questions you are answering).