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This is the second week of Module 3: Principles and Formalism. We’ll focus on perception and color. These are both huge topics, but we’ll try to get the highlights. In both cases, understanding the basic science is useful (and something I think is just “good general knowledge”). There is also Content Survey 3: Principles and Formalism and Design Warmup 3: Working with Census Data - both designed to connect to the topics (especially color).

I read the survey responses carefully and would like to respond in three ways: First, I would like to apologize for a framing (both in survey questions and class discussion) that some read in negative ways. Second, I would like to clarify some things that were misinterpreted. Third, I am making some changes to address some of the issues raised.

This page explains the feedback for Design Warmup 2: Make my visualizations. Your feedback is a comment on your Canvas submission. For each item it gives the assessment, any codes, and comments, then an overall comment, the score, and the grade.

We took extra time in grading Design Exercise 1 in order to be careful to provide consistent scores. We built tools that allowed us to assess the consistency of grading that revealed problems. I worked with Claude to arbitrate among the inconsistencies and provide better feedback.

This page explains the feedback for Design Exercise 1: Sketches and Questions. Your feedback is a comment on your Canvas submission. For each item it gives the assessment, any codes, and comments, then an overall comment, the score, and the grade.

This is an AI generated rubric used by the AI grader for the arbitration/validation check of Design Exercise 1: Sketching Solutions to Real Data Problems

This week we’ll start Module 3: Principles and Formalism. You might be wrapping up Design Exercise 2: Stories from Life Expectancy before the cutoff (hopefully using the feedback from the critique exercise). But we’ll be moving on to talking about Evaluation, Perception, Cognition, and Empirical Studies. There is a Seek and Find and a Reading survey due at the end of the week.

Update 10/26: DE2 re-submissions no longer need to include the whole assignment. Answer only the questions you changed, and leave the rest blank. See Resubmitting for the details.

If you turn in Design Exercise 2: Stories from Life Expectancy on time, you can take part in a feedback exercise: you write critiques of classmates’ designs, and you receive critiques of your own. You can earn up to 2 points for useful critiques, and the feedback you get may help you improve your assignment before you re-submit.

This page explains the feedback for Design Exercise 2: Life Expectancy (stories). Your feedback is a comment on your Canvas submission. For each item it gives the assessment, any codes, and comments, then an overall comment, the score, and the grade. This is an initial version, prepared to grade the AI prompts.

This week, we’ll wrap up Module 2: Methodology: Making and Using Visualizations. No reading this week so you can focus on Design Exercise 2: Stories from Life Expectancy which is due on Friday. One of the days in class, we’ll critique some sample solutions (both from past students as well as AI agents) to help you connect between the concepts we’re discussing and the actual practice of the assignments (as well as helping to build your sense of how we evaluate assignments). The other class day we’ll continue our discussion of design strategies: scalability, comparison, and exploration. There is an anonymous survey at the end of the week as well.

This page explains the feedback for Design Warmup 1. Your feedback is a comment on your Canvas submission. For each item it gives the assessment, any codes, and comments, then an overall comment, the score, and the grade.

This week, we continue Module 2: Methodology: Making and Using Visualizations - we’ll talk more about implemetation, as well as some key design considerations (scalability and comparison). Importantly, this week, you’ll start to make “real” visualizations with data. Reading 2-2 will ask you to try to use some grammar-based approach, and Design Warmup 2: Make Some Visualizations will ask you to make some visualizations using tools of your choice.

This week, we’ll start a new module: Module 2: Methodology: Making and Using Visualizations. Class time will be used for activities that wrap up Module 1, but we expect students to start with Reading 2-1 so you can do Reading Survey 2: Implementation and Methodology (due Fri, Oct 09) and Seek and Find 2: Too much stuff (due Fri, Oct 09).

Tableau is a commercial data analysis/visualization system. It is very popular and common (it is what most of the Unviersity data platforms use).

We will provide you with access to Tableau for class, and recommend it as an option for learning about grammar-based visualization description.

This week we’ll conclude our module on Building blocks by looking at more examples and using critique to understand how the encodings work together to serve tasks. We’ll use Wednesday’s lecture to look ahead at the next module and discuss implementation. At the end of the week, Design Exercise 1: Sketching Solutions to Real Data Problems is due - asking you to sketch designs. And Anonymous Survey 1: Attitudes and Preferences will give you an opportunity for you to provide us feedback on how the class is working.