Design Exercise 2 Feedback Instructions

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.

The Short Version

1. By Friday afternoon, we will tell you which discussion group you are in.
2. In your group’s Canvas discussion, course staff will post the group’s visualizations, one posting per visualization (without author names).
3. Reply to at least two postings with a useful critique. You choose which ones. Try to pick designs that have few or no critiques yet.
4. Finish by 11:59pm Sunday, October 25.
5. Read the critiques of your own design (and, ideally, of the others), and decide what to change in your re-submission (due 11:59pm Wednesday, October 28). Update 10/26: your re-submission only needs the questions you changed (see Resubmitting).
6. No AI. Write your critiques yourself: using AI to write them is not allowed. Uploading another student’s work to an AI tool without their permission is illegal.

What You Can Earn

You earn 1 point for each useful critique, up to 2 points (so, at most 2 points from critiquing). These are extra points, in addition to the up to 2 points available for the re-submission questions (see Design Exercise 2: Stories from Life Expectancy (The Feedback Round)).

You are encouraged to write more than two critiques: you will be helping your classmates, and you get more chances to learn. However, you can earn at most 2 points. You get both points if at least two of your critiques meet the usefulness threshold below (it does not matter which two), so extra critiques are a cushion in case some do not.

A critique is useful if it meets all of these:

1. It is a good critique. It has the properties of good critique that we discussed in class. You are not required to use the stylized form (but you are encouraged to).
2. It helps the designer. Saying what works (and should not be changed) is useful. Pointing out problems to fix is useful. Both are fine. Either way, your reasoning should be sound: based on correct principles and an attempt to understand the design.
3. It is on time. It must be posted by 11:59pm Sunday, so the designer has time to use it.
4. It is not redundant. If someone has already said what you want to say, your critique will not help the designer much. You can still make a similar point if you add something (a different reason, a suggested fix, a different aspect of the design), but the best way to avoid redundancy is to be among the first to critique a design, or to read the existing replies and say something new.

We (the course staff) read and evaluate the critiques to decide who earns points. A critique is only graded for you: the critiques your design receives do not affect your grade on the assignment.

How It Works

Groups. We will put students into small groups, each with its own Canvas discussion. We will send you your group assignment by Friday afternoon. Everyone in your group turned in on time.

Postings. For each visualization in the group, course staff will make one posting containing that visualization. Each posting is the top of a thread, and the critiques of that visualization are replies in that thread. We will not put names on the visualizations, and we will make some attempt to hide the authors’ identities. Obviously, each visualization was made by someone in your group, and authors may reveal themselves if they like (for example, by replying to a critique). We will not post rationales or other answers, so critique what you see.

Your critiques. You pick which visualizations to critique. Post your critique as a reply in that visualization’s thread. Do not create new top-level postings. Do not critique your own visualization.

Spreading things out. We want every visualization to get critiques, not just the first few in the list. We are not building a mechanism to enforce this, so it is up to the group. A few habits help:

• Before you write, look at how many replies each posting has. Prefer ones with fewer replies (especially those with none yet).
• Do not start with the first posting just because it is first.
• If you aren’t first, read the other comments to minimize redundancy.

Discussion. You are welcome (but not required) to reply to critiques, ask the critic for clarification, or discuss a design. Authors are responsible for reading the critiques of their own design. We encourage everyone to read the other critiques too: you may learn something from another student’s design and from what is said about it.

Course staff will add comments on some of the designs (not all of them).

Rules

• You may not use AI to write or help write your critiques. You may not upload another student’s work to an AI tool.
• Keep others’ work confidential. You may not share their work elsewhere (AI tools, social media, group chats, etc.).
• Do not critique your own visualization.
• Be constructive and specific. We are critiquing designs, not people.

A Note on Canvas

We are using Canvas Discussions as an experiment. They are not great for this, but they let people see each other’s critiques, which is the point. We have not tried this setup yet, so we may need to adjust the details (for example, how groups are organized or how postings are made). If something does not work, we will tell you what to do. Please let us know about problems.

Timeline