Assignment 2

Five Design Sheets

In class I have given an introduction to the Five Design Sheet Method. For this assignment apply this methodology to the research question you have chosen in the last assignment.

Process

Start your ideation process following the Five Design Sheet Method. Create several sketches. Try different types of visual representations on the data. Push yourself to create at least three different visual representations of the same data sample and attributes. Then try the same visual representation on different data attributes that may be important to your chosen tasks.

Critically think about your choice of visual encoding – no visual representation is perfect. You will probably have to make compromises. Create many sketches to begin with without judging your ideas. Then start to narrow down your ideas and try to select the ones that show the most promise. As discussed in the lecture, sketching does not necessarily have to involve pen and paper. You can use any analogue or digital tools you are comfortable with. It is important however, that these tools enable you to do lots of quick explorations, without much time commitment or effort. Remember, sketches do not have to look pretty. They don’t have to be decipherable to others. They are just for you to familiarize yourself with the data, to find interesting aspects in the dataset, and to help you to develop ideas on how to visualize them.

Digitize your sketches if necessary (you can photograph them, if you don’t have a scanner at hand) and submit sheets 2-5 as a single multipage pdf file. You can use PowerPoint to assemble them in different slides and save these slides as a pdf.

Submitting the Assignment

WHAT - You should submit a folder with your sheets 2-5 on paper or a scanned version as described above. If you submit on paper, staple the sheets together or put them in a folder or plastic cover.

WHERE - You should bring the folder to class on Thursday, December 7th or send me an electronic version of the 4 sheets before class starts.'''

WHEN - Assignment 2 is due at the beginning of class on "Thursday, December 7th.'''

License

You can reuse this content for your class if you acknowledge us (Petra Isenberg, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, Wesley Willett):