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A Course Outline for Design Students | |
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The Course Outline This course was invented last year in response to anticipated needs of the emerging marketplace and a number of experimental assignments were devised to bring both the students and the teachers up to date about the whole area of data visualization and its emerging opportunities as we see it from the design perspective vantage point. The realization of some of the trends and the discovery of critical tools and skill sets was a stated objective and it was also intended to set of a chain of research that could be done in a sustained manner in the months and years ahead. This spirit of experimentation will continue this year and we are sure to find many new and interesting sources of inspiration from around the world as well as have an opportunity top look at some of the classic sources represented by the work of the stalwarts such as Richard Saul Wurman, of Information Anxiety and Access Books fame a well as the work of Edward Tufte of Yale University and his seminal research and books on mapping of data and the study of data visualization as a whole. The new players here are the software programmers and their captive users who are expanding the space exponentially with growing expectations and exciting solutions such as map Info and Geographical Data systems used for a whole new class of uses such as transportation modeling and monitoring systems, business information and delivery systems, signage and traffic congestion data systems, access to information in a very crowded market and making visible and comprehensible complex structures and engineering trouble shooting in the 24x7x360 world of banking, call centres and distance education markets to name only a few. The course was divided into a series of interlocking and sequential assignments in a group and individual mode to make it truly inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary in approach and delivery. The two week course was divided into a series of micro assignments, each that could focus on one or more aspect of the issues that needed to be understood and each could provide some visible results in the short time that was available to the team of students and teachers, both learning go as we go along in charting this nebulous and fascinating space, inventing solutions and rules as we moved forward in the typical design way, of Intention, Action and Reflection leading to Documentation and Discourse. The following assignments were offered: Assignment 1: Digital Research on “Inspiring Personality” Individual Explorations into data-space was initiated by lectures and discussions of emerging trends and research of the internet based data-pools to be done on some famous personality that is found to be inspiring by the student. The student was to do the research and find appropriate illustrations and visuals that could support a brief document in a print and PDF format that would be ready for digital publishing as a PDF file. This study of “Inspiring Personality” would run concurrently with the other group tasks and the student was required to apportion time and resources to do this in their own time over the first week of the course. |
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