Topic outline

  • Design and Data

    How can information designers contribute to the exploration of complex issues through data representation? The course aims at integrating tools for data analysis and representation in the design process, by building an interactive web-based data visualisation platform.

    Course Teachers: Cerioli Nicola <nicola.g.cerioli@aalto.fi>

    Responsible/Supervising Teacher: Rupesh Vyas <rupesh.vyas@aalto.fi>

    Course Structure:

    The structure of the course is hybrid: including tutorials, theoretical lectures, personal work, and open discussion.

    Learning outcomes:

    The students will be provided with a set of methods and tools and will have a hands-on introduction on how to integrate them into the design process. More precisely, the covered areas will be:

    • data wrangling in google sheets

    • quick data visualisation tools

    • data scraping tools

    • building a website in HTML, CSS, JS

    • building interactive data visualisations in d3.js

    After the course, the students will be able to build interactive data visualizations and be independent in expanding their programming knowledge. 

    Will be able to parse, clean, and query big datasets and eventually learn tools to scrape data from the internet.

    A critical view on: 

    • quantitative research in the context of data representation

    • the challenge of complexity

    Before you start the course

    Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is required, otherwise, we recommend following this tutorial before the beginning of the course 

    Please, have the following software installed on your computer:

    Visual Studio Code

    Orange Data Mining

    Gephi

    an SVG editor (like Adobe Illustrator or any equivalent) 

    Have a google account in order to comfortably use google spreadsheets or have microsoft excel

    Course Schedule: 

    Week 1 

    Day 01: 14-01-2021: 

    09:15-12:00 – Introduction to the course

    Day 02: 15-01-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Basic statistics and data wrangling

    13:00-17:00 – Web development: static page 

    Week 2

    Day 03: 21-01-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Network Visualisation

    Day 04: 22-01-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Basics of data scraping

    13:00-17:00 – Web development: interactive page

    Week 3

    Day 05: 28-01-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Advanced Statistical Tools

    Day 06: 29-01-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js basics

    13:00-17:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

    Week 4

    Day 07: 04-02-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js enter update exit methods

    Day 08: 05-02-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

    13:00-17:00 – Web development: d3.js data binding

    Week 5

    Day 09: 11-02-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js scales and interactions

    Day 10: 12-02-2021

    09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

    13:00-17:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

    Week 6

    Day 09: 18-02-2021

              09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

    Day 10: 19-02-2021

              09:15-12:00 – Web development: d3.js practice

              13:00-17:00 – Web development: d3.js practice