Design Exercise 5-2: Visualizations from the Flight Data

in Design Exercises (List Page)

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.

Background on the data set and expectations are provided in Design Exercise 5-1: Experiment with the Flight Data. We recommend that you work with the “combined simplified” data set (4 months, even days, top 105 airports) - but it is acceptable to work with a single month, or to obtain your own larger data set.

The instructions for this assignment are the same as the instructions for the previous Design Exercise 4-2: 2 Data Sets, 6 Visualizations - for questions 1 and 2 (except that they come from the same data set).

You need to pick 2 questions (stories) (we will give some ideas below). You will make 2 visualizations for each question/story. These questions/stories and their visualization should be about the same data set (which must be taken from the flight delays data).

For questions 1 and 2, you must provide two different visualizations that tell the same story. You can think of them as a primary and an alternate. You need to show two different designs. It’s OK if one is better than the other (although they both should be good). It’s a chance to show an alternate (but reasonable) encoding or design strategy. Or, if you prefer, target different audiences (make one for a newspaper audience, and another for a scientific journal). We will ask you to compare the two.

For all visualizations, your visualization must be a single-page static image. You can turn each in as an image file (PNG or JPEG or WEBP - please avoid Apple specific formats), an SVG file, or a PDF file. Each image is a separate file. Each visualization must have a title and appropriate labels and legends. Your visualization should probably have a caption (in the file). Your image file should stand alone (you cannot expect the viewer to see your rationale.)

You will be asked for the “question” or “story” and a “rationale” for the design. The rationale is an opportunity for you to explain the design choices that you made to tell the story well.

See Design Exercise 4-2: 2 Data Sets, 6 Visualizations for information on a similar assignment. In particular, the ground rules, “How will we grade this?”, “Some hints”, and “Notes on a Good Question”.

Some Example Questions

We expect your “analysis” to be descriptive - your visualizations are describing what happened in the data. I might be a little sloppy in my language here. Asking “are some days worse?” might imply prediction, but in the context of the assignment, the real question is “were some days worse?” (description of the data).

  • Are some days of the week worse to fly on than others? Is the pattern similar for various airports? Is the patterns similar for different airlines?
  • Are some airlines better about being on time than others? This requires considering where they fly (airlines fly to different airports).
  • Are certain times better to fly than others (less delays)? Does this vary by airline or city?
  • Are different airports good/bad at different times of year? One might assume that airports in snowy climates have more problems in the winter (or thunderstorm-prone warm climates have problems in the summer).

Some of these questions might have simple answers. It’s up to you to use visualization to tell a richer story (for example, by providing context and details). It’s easy to say “Dallas has the worse median delays of any airport”.

With all of these, be careful about the amount of flights. When looking at a small number of flights, outliers can jump out.

Mechanics

You will turn this assignment in using the Canvas Survey Design Exercise 5-2: Visualizations from the Flight Data (due Fri, Nov 07). As always, we recommend preparing your answers beforehand.

On Wednesday, November 5th, we will have a “critique session” in class. Please bring at least one of your designs to class on paper. If you cannot bring a design on paper, have it ready to show on your laptop screen. If you don’t have a design ready, you won’t be able to get feedback from the class.

  1. What is your Question/Story 1? A single sentence (or two) should suffice.
  2. Upload your first visualization for Question/Story 1
  3. Provide the rationale for this visualization. What choices did you make so that it is effective at answering the question/telling the story? What does it make easy to see (and how)?
  4. Upload your alternate Visualization for Question 1
  5. Provide the rationale for this visualization.
  6. Compare your two visualizations that answer Question 1. What are the pros/cons of each?
  7. What is your Question/Story 2? A single sentence (or two) should suffice.
  8. Upload your first visualization for Question/Story 2
  9. Provide the rationale for this visualization. What choices did you make so that it is effective at answering the question/telling the story? What does it make easy to see (and how)?
  10. Upload your alternate Visualization for Question 2
  11. Provide the rationale for this visualization.
  12. Compare your two visualizations that answer Question 2. What are the pros/cons of each?
  13. Describe how you made these visualizations. Please list what tools you used and any data processing that you applied. If you used AI tools, please disclose them. Please be clear which data set version you started with and any processing you performed.