Homework 3b: Multivariate Data Visual Design

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with further practice in designing visualizations of data. In this assignment, the data set is more complex with many variables. (The data set is available via t-square.)

Your objective is to design a static visualization of this data set that will convey its key characteristics to the viewer. This assignment is somewhat analogous to the visualization of a year's worth of weather data from the NY Times. You should represent your visualization on the front of a single piece of paper. You don't need to faithfully and accurately map each variable, but you should provide enough detail so that the idea of your visualization is clear. A key to this assignment is to figure out what you want to represent (and what to omit) and how to represent that. You are clearly going to have to abstract and summarize different aspects of the data --- think carefully about this! On the back of your paper, or on another sheet, briefly explain your visualization well enough so that we can understand what you have done.

What to turn in: Submit your visualization on one piece of paper and then an explanation of the visualization design. For the explanation of the visualization, be careful to describe the visualization using the correct amount of detail. Think about how to describe to someone a visualization without showing them a picture of it. Think about the design principles you used (e.g., what visual metaphor, what visual encodings and glyphs, etc.). Also, what are the bindings to the data that you have designed for? How have you thought about interaction?

Grading: We will evaluate the effectiveness of your visualization for communicating the fundamental aspects of the data set. Does it give the viewer a good understanding of the different characteristics of the data? First, we will evaluate the quality of your analytic questions. Here, we are looking for both effectiveness and creativity. (We do realize that people have differing levels of design ability and experience. Here, we are looking for a good effort, not necessarily some InfoVis conference paper-worthy new idea. Still, we have gone over many different graphical techniques in class and we want to see if you can begin to apply these effectively.) The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with experience in the analysis of data like this and the design of visualizations to present the data.