In this assignment, you will sketch (with pen and paper!) 3 visualizations of a small dataset and provide brief reflections of your designs.
Why sketch? Why not just dive right into coding or using some visualization tool? Sketching is a quick and cheap form of prototyping — a process of simulating how a finished product could look and work. Prototyping is a critical part of the design process as it allows us to test the feasibility of our ideas early on. A prototype’s “fidelity” refers to how much it is able to convey the look of the final product in terms of its level of detail. By moving from low-fidelity prototypes to higher-fidelity ones, we can develop and polish our ideas gradually, focusing on one particular aspect of the product at a time (Babich, 2017).
But prototyping (and sketching, in particular) is also extremely helpful in generating ideas. Rather than grappling with the functionality of any given design tool (which can often influence your design process, even implicitly), or committing to any one specific design, sketching allows us to more rapidly explore the space of possible designs. And research has shown that prototyping several ideas in parallel often leads to better outcomes (Dow et al., 2011;Tohidi et al., 2006).
In this assignment, we are going to gain some practice with sketching visualizations. These sketches will then inform the subsequent assignment. Just like any other activity, sketching can seem intimidating if you have ever done it before. So we have compiled some inspiring examples and left you some tips at the end of this page.
Every 10 years, the census bureau documents the demographic make-up of the United States, influencing everything from congressional districting to social services. This dataset contains a high-level summary of census data for two years a century apart: 1900 and 2000. The data is a table that describes the U.S. population in terms of year, reported sex, age group (binned into 5 year segments from 0-4 years old up to 90+ years old), and the total count of people per group. There are 38 data points per year, for a total of 76 data points.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau via IPUMS
Your sketches should be interpretable without consulting your write-ups. Do not forget to include the title, axis labels or legends as needed!
We do not expect your sketches to include every datapoint, or even accurately represent the data (that’s why we’ve rounded all data values to the nearest 50,000!). The goal of this assignment is to draft different visualization designs. Thus, we do not expect your visualizations to be “perfect,” but rather communicate three ideas that you would plausibly be excited to continue exploring in the subsequent assignment. In fact, we encourage you to use sharpies/markers/felt-tip pens so that your lines are thicker and you are less focused on being “accurate.”
Note: For this assignment, you should not analyze or visualize the data with tools such as Vega(-Lite), Tableau, or Chart.js. We instead expect you to just look at the dataset and create hand-drawn sketches.
This assignment is scored out of a maximum of 10 points. We will determine scores by judging the diversity of your sketches, the creativity of your ideas, and the crispness of your write ups.
You can be awarded a maximum of 3 points for each sketch and its related reflection. The remaining 1 point will be awarded for communicating your overall reflection across the 3 sketches as described in the above section “Your Tasks”.
This is an individual assignment. You may not work in groups. Your completed assignment is due on Monday 2/22, 11:59 pm EST.
Submit your assignment on canvas. Compile your sketches and writeups as a single PDF file. Make sure your images are sized for a reasonable viewing experience — readers should not have to zoom or scroll in order to effectively view any sketch!