Visual Communication Design 10: Visualization of Data

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

MATERIALS FEE. The course develops an understanding of what data means to humans and how does its visualization helps communicate ideas in the fields of medicine, technology and social sciences. The course touches upon measurement, collection and reporting, analysis but ultimately focuses on visualization. Visualization is when the data comes alive and is ready to be used to communicate a complex concept be it numeric, spatial, process or temporal. Types of data covered in this course include but are not limited to: geographical, cultural, scientific, financial, statistical, meteorological, natural, and transportation data. The goal of the exercises within this course is to understand how data can be used to tell a story as opposed to merely packaging and plotting a set of numbers on a page. The design process is therefore exploring the static, dynamic, interactive or 3-dimensional and performance formats of representation and understand why a certain format is more or less suitable for the nature of data, its analysis and therefore its representation. Students develop an understanding of how the graphics being used must correlate completely with the data and numbers that are being represented. The course traverses through these considerations to understand the various approaches that can be used to bring data to life and allow the viewer to understand a story that is being packaged within the representation. Is there revelation or a deeper understanding of a pattern once your data has been visualized and presented that had not been discovered earlier?