The Week in Vis: Week 4 (Sep 21-25)

This week we’ll continue learning about the building blocks of visualization and start applying them to design. We’ll make use of what you’ve read about in the first week: we’ll practice critique to learn from visualizations, and we’ll start putting encodings, layouts and transformations together to make visualizations. This week, we’ll also have our first design warmup which will give you a chance to redesign some visualizations.

This is the second week in Module 1: Building Blocks.

The reading this week are the experiential readings (things I really want you to experience the papers): Reading 1-2.

Content Survey 1: Building Blocks (due Fri, Sep 25) will ask you about the readings.

Design Warmup 1: Re-Design (Terrible Vis) will ask you to critique and re-design some visualizations. Amazingly, I was able to find some bad ones (so making improvements shouldn’t be too challenging). You will turn this in on canvas at Design Warmup 1: Ask Questions, Sketch Answers (due Fri, Sep 25). For this exercise, you will be sketching: you won’t need to make any “real” visualizations yet.

Looking ahead… next week you will do Design Exercise 1: Sketching Solutions to Real Data Problems. It’s still sketching, but it’s a chance to work with some real data sets (that we’ll use again in future weeks). Yes, you can look at it if you want to get a head start.

As for class time… One day we’ll do critique practice, and one day we’ll dig more into encodings, layouts, and transformations to see how to put them together to make visualizations. Both will have ICAs. I haven’t decided which day for which topic.