Week 8 (Mon, Oct 23-Fri, Oct 27) – Perception
- Mon, Oct 23 : Class: Perception Lecture
- Wed, Oct 25 : Class (ICE): Scatter Compare
- Fri, Oct 27 : No Class (Extra Office Hour)
- Reading: Week 8 – Perception
- Discussion 8: Perception (first post due 10/24)
- Seek and Find 8: Name that Encoding! (and change it) (due 10/27)
- Design Challenge : DC2 – Lists (due 10/29)
Last week, we talked about evaluation (and Tufte), and looked at a design problem as a way to think about design choices, evaluation, and comparison. And you (supposedly) wrapped up DC1. Many of you came and talked about DC2.
This week, we’ll move on to the study of human perception, and how it can influence Vis. We’ll just be touching the tip of the iceberg – since perception is a huge topic, and it can have wide-ranging impact on how we do visualization and design.
Part of the interest in perception for vis is the empirical methodology – which can be applied more broadly. I am not sure how deep we’ll be able to get into the design of experiments.
Design Challenge 2 also starts – beware that the first phase has a hard deadline.
This week, there will be no class on Friday. I’ll have an extra office hour in the class time slot (11-noon) if you want to come by to talk about things Vis or class related.
Learning Goals (for this week)
- Have enough of the basics of how human perception works to appreciate how it can impact visualization design.
- Understand key phenomena, such as popout, grouping, and aggregation, and see how they can be applied in visualization design.
- Have awareness of key perceptual and cognitive limitations, and how these can impact the success of visualization design.
- Appreciate how perceptual science methodologies can provide guidelines for visualization design.
- (probably not time to get to it) Appreciate how the empirical approaches of perception research can be adapted to visualization.
