Design by Code
Bram Bogaerts
b.bogaerts@artez.nl
Semester 1
Every day, more and more data is being published on just about every subject imaginable. The election campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were driven by data in order to better understand voters. Data is being used to digitally preserve the cultural heritage of Iraq in the wake of IS’ destructive power. At CERN in Switzerland, data is being recorded by the petabyte in order to better understand our physical surroundings.
In the form of numbers, it is nearly impossible to get a sense of the stories that all these different types of datasets hold. When delved into, analyzed, combined with other information, and visualized we can, however, gain insights into, or inject our viewpoint into the discourse of the subject. This is your assignment: to find one or more interesting datasets, use data to visualize or to comment on the subject, and tell the story within the data in a readable and understandable manner.
You will begin with a research phase. Look into a subject that inspires you and has some form of urgency. From there, you will enter a data-gathering phase where you will look for and compile the streams and sources of information related to your chosen topic. With this data you will look for opportunities for visualization or commentary.
Programming will be a central part of both your research and design processes. In the coming weeks we will see how we can use programming to understand the contents of data sets, to quickly test ideas we have about the stories embedded in data, and to produce visual outcomes.
- Finding, cleaning and understanding datasets.
- Extracting stories from numbers and data.
- Creating tools to translate and visualize data files.
- Exploring different forms of data visualization and user interaction.
- Making informed design decisions regarding data visualization.
- Week 1: Research
- Week 2: Topic or topics selected for discussion, sources of data / information related to those topics, ideas for possible directions, sketches
- Week 3: Topic selected, continued data gathering and research, sketches
- Week 4: Continued data gathering and research, sketches, direction for outcome
- Weeks 5 - 6: Development, programming, execution
- Week 7: Outcome nearly complete, discuss and and implement refinements / improvements
- Week 8: Project discussion and review
- How well can you substantiate both your choice of dataset and your design decisions?
- How inviting is the story or message that you are conveying?
- How well does the design fit the content of the dataset?
- Does it work?
- How inviting is the form and design, and does it deliver the data in an understandable and readable manner?
- Is the data visualization true, in the sense of not skewing or distorting the data in the database, and if not, what is your reasoning behind the distortion?
- Manuel Lima – Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information
- Infosthetics
- Creative Applications
- Information is Beautiful
- Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec – Dear Data
- Nicholas Felton, Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten – Photoviz: Visualizing Information through Photography
- FiveThirtyEight
- Flowing Data – Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, Nicolas Bourquin, Thibaud Tissot
- Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design
- Darrell Huff - How to Lie with Statistics
- Awesome Public Datasets
- Awesome Resources
- Awesome Creative Coding
- An example of an API: OpenWeatherMap // tweak the ...q= ######## &a...