Sketching Assignment

Now that you know your project research question, your job is to brainstorm designs that help to clearly communicate them or help other people to explore the data according to your question. For now, imagine that the data visualization website you build has a title that corresponds to your overarching research question.

As we said in class, the best way to come up with a good idea is to have lots of them, and narrow down. Your task in this assignment is to brainstorm many designs, and then use some basic criteria to filter and select the best ideas. You will then hand in a polished version of the final designs that you chose.

The goal of this exercise is to show you that if you have an open mind, your first idea is (unlikely) to be your best idea. Instead, the process of brainstorming, discussing and affinity diagramming can help you find good ideas that you had not considered before.

Important:

  • do not limit yourself to things you know how to build yet

Your Mission

In this exercise go through the following steps:

  • Brainstorm session. With your group (or alone, if you chose to work as a Team of 1), schedule a mutual time that you can get together and work for at least an hour together. Brainstorm and sketch ideas -- one each on a single sheet of paper. The goal here is to sketch as many distinct ideas as you can -- you should aim for at least -- at least -- four sketches a person. Anything goes: crazy or boring, whole system or even just a small piece of the system. You are aiming here for variance: the ideas should be different from one another. You are allowed to build off of one another's ideas, but make sure that they're different. If you end up with a bunch of sketches that are essentially variations on the exact same idea, try again, because you didn't do it right. You can use card decks we created to come up with meaningfully different ideas.
  • Discussion. This can be part of your brainstorming session, or a different one altogether. As a group, go through each of the sketches one by one, discussing the main idea of the sketch. Group you sketches or the ideas extracted from the sketches. At the end of this, you will have several different groups of ideas. Discuss each of these groups in relation to your project, their weaknesses, strengths, feasibility and originality.
  • Select and polish ideas. From your discussion session, select the most promising ideas (at least one per team member present), discuss them
  • Re-sketching your most promising ideas: Re-sketch the 1-3 most promising sketches neatly on a piece of paper, each student needs to sketch one!
  • Your sketch needs to be understandable by others, so add legible annotations and/or provide descriptions where appropriate.
  • Each person needs to submit one sketch.
  • Don't put any names on the sketch. Name the digital file.

Final Sketch

For your final sketch you can follow the following structure:

Here is an example from last year's class:

And another one:

Deliverable

  • Digitize your sketches (you can photograph them, if you don’t have a scanner at hand) as .jpg/.png images of at least 2000px resolution on the shorter side. The text and details of your sketch need to be clearly visible. Name each image YOURLASTNAME-Assignment5.jpg or YOURLASTNAME-Assignment5.png.
  • SUBMIT - Each student should submit 1 final sketch they resketched via this form
  • WHEN - The deadline for handing in the assignment is end of the day Sunday November 8th