The weekly assignment for our Design Theory class is to make a series of concept maps that summarize the readings. I’m almost afraid to admit how much fun I’m having on homework, but I love watching the concept maps evolve from a messy collection of concepts to a more coherent, structured narrative. I’m going to indulge…
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ResearchMethods: Object autopsy
The focus of our research methods class is a semester-long project to get “under the surface” of an object to explore both its origins and its implications. I was inspired by an article by Michael Pollan to take a closer look at something that I have always found fascinating: dirt. I began by compiling a list of the…
DesignTheory: Visualizing Networks
My Design History class with Paul Kahn got me very interested in the early 1800’s as a period of design innovation. People has access to public data and statistics tools for the first time, and developed a host of new tools to visualize this new kind of information. William Playfair invented bar and pie charts,…
DesignTheory: Concept of design
We’re only a week into classes, and already the semester is off and running. My design theory class this semester is taught by Hugh Dubberly, who lives in San Francisco, so we will meet via Skype once a week, and in person for a weekend intensive workshop a couple of times a semester. The first…
VizTech: Semester summary and final project
We covered a lot of ground in the VizTech class last semester (my git repositories are here, if you’re curious). Starting with basic HTML and CSS in the first couple of weeks, we quickly moved into writing conditional statements and loops with Javascript, as well as importing and accessing data. By the 4th week of…
How teaching prepared me for design
Teachers are storytellers. Above all else, your job at the front of a classroom is to take a complicated, often inconsistent and bewildering array of facts and ideas and turn it into a story that feels coherent and intuitive to your students. Failing intuitive, it should at least feel approachable. Teachers make the complex simple….
VisComm: Elements of Style
The final project for my VisComm class was to create a book layout to summarize and demonstrate the principles of style described by Christopher Alexander in his 4-book series The Nature of Order. We were given a heading and subheading, and needed to provide the text and images to illustrate and explain the ideas. My…
ID Studio: Country poster
The third project of the semester for my ID Studio class was to make an atlas page (of any size) to visually show economic information for a country. We were given a page from the Economist magazine, and asked to create a graphic containing the following information: The country in the continent 5 major cities 5 nearby countries Size…
LED Grid: First hardware tests
This is a guest post by Branden Gunn, about building the LED Grid for our collaborative design project. In the last post, the boards had just arrived, and the rest of the parts were on order. A few days later, everything was here! Because resistors are so cheap when you get 100 or 500, it…
VisComm: Monarch butterfly poster
My VisComm class was assigned the task of making a poster on an environmental topic this semester. We chose a general sub-topic (water, land use, etc.) from a list of options, and then researched and created an informational poster to summarize that particular aspect of the environment. I chose to work on biodiversity, and then decided…