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TUMO Creative Technologies

Personal Geographies: Exploring Your Community Through the Lens of Data Visualization

Day 3 (January 14th, 2021)

https://tumopersonalgeographies.github.io/

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Iterinary for Today’s Class:

Design Critiques Presentations

Methodology of Hand-drawn Sketches

Rapid Prototyping Exercises

Digitized Sketching in Adobe XD

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What value is there in sketching by hand?

At first, it might seem counterintuitive to reach for physical tools (rules, papers, colored pencils, etc.) when presented with large, digitized sets of data. However, creating hand-drawn sketches can pay dividends for expository projects if you’re looking…

To take more artistic freedoms with the style of visual representation
To visually communicate the variability or lack of preciseness inherent in data
To compare how different visualizations types are more/less suited to your needs
To piece together how multiple interrelated visualizations can be assembled into a single dashboard or website

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What value is there in sketching by hand? (cont.)

Source: Mona Chalabi, UK Ministry of Housing

Visualization Title: “First Time Home Buyers Average Age”

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What value is there in sketching by hand? (cont.)

Source: Laurie Frick

Visualization Title: “Sleep Drawings”

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Activity 3.1: Rapid prototyping (10 minutes)

During this exercise, a dataset will be shown, and you will have three consecutive stints of time to sketch it. The catch is that the window of time for each sketch will progressively increase in duration, starting at 30 seconds, before transitioning to 1 minute, and finally eclipsing at 5 minutes…

Please restart your sketch after each window of time. Do not continue working on or refining your existing sketches.
Feel free to think of creative ways to represent the data.

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Activity 3.1: Rapid prototyping (10 minutes)

Source: World Bank, DataHub

Dataset Title: “Population figures for countries, regions (e.g. Asia) and the world”

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Activity 3.2: Reading about a recent cartography

project called “Mapping Manhattan” (15 minutes)

Hand-drawn maps meld exactitude and precision with a more subjective, creative vision of how space is laid out. On this note, a recent cartography project set in Manhattan aimed to better understand how New Yorkers view the city’s layout…

Please find the link to the aforementioned article in this lecture’s Google Doc. Take notes as you progress through the reading and comment on what you found intriguing about examples of different representations.

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Activity 3.2: Reading about a recent cartography

project called “Mapping Manhattan” (15 minutes)

Source: Patricia Marx, Writer at the New Yorker

Visualization Title: “Mapping Manhattan”

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Activity 3.3: Sketching a map of Yerevan

(25 minutes)

In the spirit of the reading from Activity 3.1, during this activity you will sketch your very own map of Yerevan (or another city that piques your interest). Without looking at a formal reference photo, try to create a rough layout of the city by memory…

Feel free to add as many artistic flourishes as you would like
If you so choose, make a note of places that have any special significance or importance to you

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Break ends at 6:00pm

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Using sketching as a research tool

It’s important to pay attention to the apparent link between the structural organization of your dataset, the research questions you’re most interested in examining, and the types of visualizations at your disposal. Ask yourself…

1. What columns (and respective data types) could be useful?
2. What do I want to find out about this subset of data?
3. Are there any problems or issues that the data could help solve?
4. Which graphs might I use to communicate my insights?

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Using sketching as a research tool (cont.)

Homing in on steps 2 and 3 outlined in the previous slide, here are some questions that can help you narrow down the problem/issue you examine…

Are there any unexpected relationships (causal or correlative) between variables?
How and why does the data change over time?
What can help explain the trends and patterns in the data values?

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Activity 3.4: A guided group research/

sketching exercise (15 minutes)

Together as a class, we will examine a chosen dataset and brainstorm creative ways we can use sketching to answer a series of our own research questions…

As you look over the rows and columns in the dataset, begin thinking about any trends or relationships between variables that you are curious about. It may be helpful to pair such questions with the list of possible visualization types from yesterday’s lecture.

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Activity 3.5: A group-based research/sketching

exercise (30 minutes)

To synthesize the concepts we’ve learned today about hand-drawn sketches with the progress you made searching for datasets in days prior, you will each be paired into groups of 2 for this next sketching activity…

Out of the list of datasets you chose for day 1’s homework assignment, please narrow your list down to just 1 that you would like to work with for this activity.
Brainstorm a research question and sketch 3 different visualizations to answer it