Assignment 7: Perception

by Mike Gleicher on February 12, 2017

Due Date: Initial Posting Due 2/27, further discussion over the next week (cutoff after 3/10)

Turn in: Via Canvas Discussion

Reading: Reading 7 Perception 101 (Due 2/27 and 3/1)

Hopefully, the readings will give you a crash course in visual perception. The goal of this discussion is to get you to think about what you’ve read, and start to build the connections to visualization.

There’s a different discussion to have about “graphical perception” and how those papers inform our visualization practice – we’ll have that conversation later.

For this week, the discussion should be about human perception and how the facts of perception. We want everyone to post two “conversation starters” – and then at least 2 more postings in response to others. (so this week, there is a minimum of 4 postings). Be sure to make your postings early enough that others can read and respond.

  • In your initial posting, give some examples of how the mechanisms of the visual system give rise to efficiencies and inefficiencies that can be considered to create effective visualization designs (and graphic design more generally). Can you connect facts about the visual system to design principles we’ve seen in class?
  • In a second posting, we are curious what “fun facts about how the human visual system works” you found surprising (or at least interesting). If you’ve taken a perception class before, you’ve seen all this, so maybe nothing was surprising this time around – so say what you found surprising the first time around.
  • As a conversation topic, try to build connections between this knowledge of how vision works, and what we might do for design.

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