Class Project - Make an Impact!

The purpose of the final project is to provide hands-on experience designing, implementing, and evaluating a visualization method, algorithm or tool. The data we collect and visualize can have a big impact on people. Yet, visualizations and data analyses are not neutral. Many choices we make in visual analytics impact what our audience will be able to see and take away. These choices range from the data we choose to analyze, the variables we choose to show, the colors we choose to use, to the text we choose to accompany a visual representation.

In this project you will be working in groups of 1-3 on a project that has to have potential social impact. You can choose a topic that YOU are excited about. This may be climate change, gender equality, the fight against a certain disease, inequality, gender pay gaps, ... You can choose to be persuasive (while being true to the data) and try to make strong cases for your topic.

Prior to starting your project, it is helpful to gain a sense of what goes into formulating a successful visualization project and to beware of common pitfalls. We encourage you to read A Nested Model for Visualization Design and Validation by Tamara Munzner. You will also present your results in class and/or online and receive peer evaluations.

If the results are sufficiently interesting we can later see to submit them to a fitting contest or exhibit them online.

Resources

Examples

Related Competitions

Final Deliverables

The final deliverable will be an implementation of the proposed solution, a demo, and a written report. The details of the submission, the demo and report will be given out soon. There will also be a few intermediary feedback rounds to give out.

Finished Project Gallery

See what last year's students accomplished: https://www.aviz.fr/TeachingVA2019/Project