The goal of this assignment is to gain practice in designing visualizations for new problems by rapid brainstorming and sketching. The assignment also allows you to use some of the techniques that you've learned this term in creating a new visualization for an interesting problem. Your assignment is to produce a design for a visualization of travel schedules. This is a tricky problem that combines many of the information types we discussed in class. Hence, simply applying one of the existing tools we discussed will likely not work well. A custom solution is needed.

Data: Suppose that we have a record of every flight between major airports in the U.S. during a particular month. We have the starting location, the ending location, the time of departure, the time of arrival, and the date(s) of each flight. We know the airline and number of each flight. In addition, we know the identities of all the people on each of the flights. Furthermore, we know the seat position of each person on a flight.

Your task is to design a visualization that will aid a person in performing a set of analysis tasks on the data set. What those analysis tasks are depend largely on the domain, so we'll provide a coupld example domains below.

Example domains for this general problem are:

• Terrorist detection: Intelligence agencies track the travel plans and histories of a large group of suspected terrorists. Analysts look for patterns in the travel of groups of people or seek to discover interesting patterns in the movements of people. Further, analysts may seek to discover suspicious patterns from individuals who have not been identified as suspects. In the strongest case, an intelligence agency may seek to discover potential attack plans or analyze previous attacks to identify likely terrorist participants.
• Business travel: Travel managers must arrange good travel schedules for many distributed salespersons to diverse locations, including possible group meetings.
• Airline planning: An airline may seek to analyze the patterns of passengers on their flights for the month to optimize distribution of flights, planes, crews, etc. Where are more flights needed? Where can flights be cut?

Individual tasks: Your visualization should provide insight about the overall travel patterns at a high level as well as the movements of particular individuals of interest. In the case of terrorist detection, typical tasks might include:

• when will each person be where?
• when and where are potential group meetings?
• is anyone traveling together? (e.g. potential hijacking)
• is anyone flying at same time in different locations? (e.g. potential mass hijacking)
• are there multi-person delivery sequences? (e.g. person A visits person B, then person B visits person C, ...)
• or information dissemination trees? (e.g. person A visits B and C, ...)
• who doesn't seem to fit in with the rest? (e.g. probably not a terrorist)

What to hand in: In general, I am seeking some pictures of your visualization and a relatviely brief explanation and discussion of how it would work. More specifically, you should turn in

• 1-3 pages of pictures. These can be hand-drawn with colored pencils if you'd like. The idea here is to help explain what the visualization will look like and how it will work. The overall intent is to lean toward low-fidelity rapid prototyping, not development of a software system.
• 2 pages of description. This should be typed. Include:
  • Describe the pictures and interaction as needed.
  • Describe the tasks that would be facilitated by the visualization and explain why.
  • Describe what is good and bad about your solution, or any tradeoff decisions that you made (no solution solves everything!).

Important: Focus your time on thinking and dreaming up designs. Don't waste your time trying to draw your design perfectly in some fancy visualization tool.