When Data Meets Design

Catalog description

The student will become an effective generator and consumer of the data visualizations that saturate public and professional discourse. The student will examine the rules of design and how they can be used to construct compelling visualizations of data. The student will use this knowledge to critique data visualizations from the media and their peers. The student will produce data visualizations of their own using data sets that they generate and analyze. Though the focus throughout the course will be on natural science, we will also consider data relevant to areas such as business, science, history, education, and politics. The student will emerge from this course with an appreciation of how data visualizations influence their life, as well as the skill set to craft persuasive visualizations to support issues of interest to them. For the purposes of this course no prior knowledge is assumed in science, data handling, or design. We will build the knowledge and vocabulary needed in order to pair these two domains and equip you with a lifelong tool for creating persuasive data-driven explanations.