Information visualization 2019-2020

The 2019-2020 Promotion

The idea of embodied or arts-oriented data visualisation came to me when I attended a Data Literacy workshop organised in Aix en Provence in 2017 where I met the Colombian designer Jose Duarte who created the easydataviz toolkit and Suzanne Jachsko who in her data cuisine workshops, uses food as a medium for information and turns it into amazing data artefacts.
I adapted their ideas to the data literacy course I teach to second year Masters' students enrolled in the Master's track on Data, Information and Digital Communication, Information and Communication Devices (DICOD, option A).
Students work in small groups to choose a topic, research data on their topic and give the data a material or embodied form which will then be displayed prominently in an urban space (here the school premises was used). The goal is to encourage participation of the public, facilitate their understanding of real life phenomena and raise awareness which can lead to decision making (action, change of behaviour).
Below are some of the "urban dataviz" projects created by the students which were displayed in the hall of the School of Journalism & Communication for a week. In the short videos below the images, students explain what they tried to portray (en français, sorry if you don't speak Molière's lingua!).

In which month were you born?

In this exhibit, students constructed cylindrical transparent tubes stuck to a rigid carton representing the 12 months of the year. Small coloured scrolled paper (a different colour for each month) were placed in a small carton and passers-by placed the paper into the tube corresponding to their month of birth. This way, it appeared at the end of the display that most students and staff in the School were born either in December, June or July

What is your preferred means of information?

In this exhibit, students sought to poll the members of the public on the media people use most to be informed. The choice was between print newspapers, internet, TV and Radio. Small coloured metal balls and boxes representing the different means were used as voting mechanism. Passers-by could then vote by putting the corresponding ball into the box representing their preferred means of information.

What's your mood today?

This data visualisation project sought to gauge the moods of students and staff at the school. Using stickers, people placed stickers at the position corresponding to their mood on two axes (x = tired to motivated; y= anxious to happy). Although this may look trivial, it is a way of making people think about the coordinates of the two axes in a more fun way than when working on a data in a spreadsheet which many find daunting.

How do you revise for exams?

This exhibit sought to visualise students' strategies in revising for their exams. Do they revise or not? Are they stressed during revisions or not? Using colours indicating the intensity, students could place a sticker at the position corresponding to their revision strategy.

What means of transport do you use to come to the School?

Students designed this poster showing different means of transportation. Using stickers, passers-by could place a sticker in the column corresponding to their preferred means of transportation to come to the school. At the end of the display time, it became obvious which means of transport was used by the majority of the school population.