Tomi Kauppinen gave on November 23th, 2020 a flash talk on “Learning about information visualisation via exploring and creativity” at U-Create 2020: Creativity amid Crisis event.
Here’s the abstract of the talk:
“In this talk I am happy to share my experiences of teaching information visualisation in a very explorative manner. In the course we make use of online examples, tools and articles and then have seven (7) intensive face to face sessions in creative spaces to discuss and work together, mainly at the Design Factory or Learning Centre. Thus the course builds on the idea of flipped classroom and blended learning ideas. The idea is to learn to support information usability by exploring and finding interesting stories from datasets in visual ways.Our focus is on the process-thinking, thus starting from sparse datasets and to understand the tasks for iteratively making sense of data. For the course I have also recorded short podcasts on information visualisation, publicly available via soundcloud. The podcasts are about four important aspects for creating information visualisations: stories, time, space and theme. Learners (around 30 to 50 students) in the course have typically diverse backgrounds, ranging from arts and digital media to computer science and information networks or geoinformatics. I have also very much used the great experiences from my infoviz course in many ways when leading Aalto Online Learning since 2016.”