Proposal

Table of contents

The purpose of the final project is to provide hands-on experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating a visualization method, tool, application, or narrative. Projects will be carried out by teams of up to 4 people. Your project should address a concrete visualization problem and propose a novel, creative solution. The final deliverable will be an implementation of the proposed solution and a short paper.

In addition, you will be responsible in submitting an MVP and then presenting your final results orally near the end of the semester. Prior to starting your project, it is helpful to gain a sense of what goes into formulating a successful visualization project and to beware of common pitfalls such as making unrealistic assumptions, measuring the wrong thing, overfitting, or trying a technical solution for a problem that doesn’t need a technical solution.

Your Task

Each team member should submit a PDF of the project proposal. (The content should be the same for all team members) Your proposal should cover the following sections:

  1. The names of the members of your group.

  2. Crisply state the question you are interested in exploring in the final project. Remember that finding the right question to ask is an important skill you are learning during your time at CMU so we put emphasis on it when we evaluate the final project. A good proposal clearly describes the meaningful, challenging, and specific goals of the project.

  3. Your motivation for addressing this question. For instance, explain why you are interested in this dataset and why others may be interested too. This motivation can stem from your personal experiences or interests.

  4. Which track you are targeting (Interactive Visualization vs Narrative vs Research)? More details about each track are below.

  5. List of possible datasets that may help you answer this question. Although you likely only have time for preliminary analysis of any datasets, if you provide links or descriptions, the instructors can give you feedback on if they feel the data will be rich enough to answer your questions.

  6. Who is your audience, and what is the purpose or goal of the visualization you hope to construct? For instance, are you hoping to communicate to the general public to raise their awareness about an issue?

    It is essential that you have a clear audience for your data visualization as it will help you determine how to frame and communicate the data. For instance, if your audience is more knowledgeable about the topic, perhaps you’re able to dive into the specifics more directly. On the other hand, if you’re speaking to a more general audience, perhaps you need to convey more background first. If your audience may be skeptical of your narrative, you may have to work to dispel some common myths they might hold.

  7. Provide several examples or precedents of how to reach this audience and achieve your stated purpose.

    Every data visualization project starts with looking at precedents or examples for inspiration. You might select a precedent for several reasons: perhaps you wish to emulate a visualization’s narrative structure (e.g., author-guided, reader-driven, martini glass) or genre (e.g., slideshow, poster, comic, etc.); or, perhaps you like aspects of the visual encodings, animation, or interaction design that you’d like to adapt (e.g., representing people through iconography, adopting a more illustrative aesthetic, eliciting your reader’s beliefs first, etc.). For each precedent, explain why it is relevant to your audience and the question you seek to explore.

    To help you find precedents, places that you might find great examples of visualizations include /r/dataisbeautiful and annual “Year in Graphics” that various newsrooms curate (e.g., The NYTimes in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020, The WaPo in 2022, FiveThirtyEight in 2023, 2022 and 2021 and so forth).

For the final project, you should choose one of 3 tracks. All 3 tracks should feature data analysis, visualizations, and narrative aspects, but their weight will be different depending on the track chosen.

Interactive Visualization / Application Track

  • Core contribution is an interactive visualization, interactive application, or widget component
  • Could develop a custom visualization tool or library
  • You might choose this if you want to focus on programming visualizations and developing an application to support rich exploration of a data set.

Narrative Track

  • Present a narrative around some data, analysis, and visualization
  • Results could be an interactive article
  • The interactive narrative visualization you make – how it is structured and designed – will be entirely up to you and your teammates. For instance, you might follow a strongly author-guided narrative (e.g., a scrolly or stepper slideshow), be fully reader-driven (e.g., an interactive data dashboard), or lie somewhere in-between (i.e., the “martini glass” structure).
  • You might choose this if you want to focus on data communication.

Research Tack

  • Core contribution is designing or presenting and communicating data from a research study you are involved with outside this classroom.
  • You might choose this if you want to focus on applying your own research area to this class

Unless granted instructor permission, you should work in groups of up to 4 people. If you are looking for project partners, please post on “Canvas”.

Datasets

You may wish to explore our collection of datasets for inspiration.

Final Deliverables and Deadlines

Grading

This milestone is worth 10 points. We will use the following rubric to grade your assignment. We will determine scores by judging how well you define and motivate the question you’re interested in addressing in your final project, and the breath and analysis of precedents.

Component Excellent Satisfactory Poor
Data Question & Motivation An interesting question (i.e., one without an immediately obvious answer) is posed. You went above and beyond in finding extra materials to help define the problem. And that information is presented clearly and makes sense.
(5 points)		 A reasonable question is posed, and is relatively well-grounded in the materials provided. The presentation begins to demonstrate an understanding of why this issue is important and worth addressing.
(4 points)		 You can lose points for any of the following:
(a) question is difficult to understand, vague, or posed too broadly to be addressable in a final project
(b) motivation or cited evidence is missing, communicated poorly, or is mismatched to the question
Audience & Purpose — The audience you seek to address, and the purpose your final project would play, is clear.
(2 points)		 You can lose points for any of the following
(a) if you audience or purpose is not specific (e.g., “everyone” is too broad a definition and will not help inform your design process)
(b) if there is a mismatch between the question/problem you seek to address and your choice of audience/purpose
Examples & Precendents You’ve identified particularly relevant, creative, or unusual precedents to inform your final project. Your analysis richly describes how choices in genre and affordance could yield a compelling experience for your audience and purpose.
(3 points)		 Your precedents are well-chosen and suit the problem you have selected. However, casting a wider net might turn up more diverse design opportunities you might not have considered. Your analysis, similarly, does a nice job of describing what might be reusable/adaptable for your project, but could better connect to impacts on your audience and purpose.
(2 points)		 You may lose points for any of the following:
(a) it’s not clear how the precedents align with the problem or audience
(b) it’s not clear how the precedent serves as a source of inspiration, or how it is helpful
(c) a discussion of precedents is missing or shallow

Advice

Forming Teams

To facilitate a cohesive team and healthy dynamic, we encourage you to discuss the following issues as you form your team:

  1. What are your interests in the course? What skills or domain knowledge does each member bring to the table? What do you want to learn? And what grade are you targeting?

  2. What is your schedule like? What days and times of day are you available to work on this class project? When can you find a time to meet? Plan a time when your group can have regular meetings outside of class, so it’s on your schedule now and for the rest of the semester.

  3. Have you ever worked in a group before, and what are some of the challenges you faced? Explain your weakness in group work so the rest of the team can help support you.

  4. Pick a project manager. As we’re all aware, the semester can get busy and it’s easy to lose track of things. The project manager will help keep the group coordinated, facilitate communication between group members, and help everyone stay on track. The project manager will also be the primary contact with the course staff and client.