Class Intro
Visual communication via diagrams, sketches, charts, photographs, video, and animation is fundamental to the process of exploring concepts and disseminating information1. They are a crucial components in various forms of scientific communication, ranging from papers, slides, to even videos. Nice figures and diagrams serve as an effective tool in conveying complex ideas and information and makes them easily digestible and engaging; carefully designed tables can break down complex results and help people compare, contrast, and draw conclusions.
The curation of the visual design usually involves two phases: ideation and implementation. In the ideation phase, the designer starts from some abstract concepts or ideas and searches for visual objects and designs to instantiate and embody the concepts. Given the proposed design draft, the designer then picks the tools and techniques that will be used to implement the design in terms of sketches, diagrams, or charts. This is often an iterative process, where the designer might go back and forth between the two phases until the design is finalized. In practice, the two phases often interfaces with each other, and the toolbox at the designer’s disposal can influence the ideation process.
While implementing such designs seems to be a challenging task for researchers, who might not have received formal design training, there are unique advantages for researchers to create great visuals. First, researchers are often great thinkers and they are trained to communicate complex scientific ideas in a clear and concise manner via text (e.g., writing papers), which, we will show later in this class, is a transferable skill for creating visuals. Moreover, when it comes to making visuals, the researcher is usually the person who come up with the original idea to be communicated. If they set out to create the visuals themselves, they are in the best position to understand the idea and the message to be conveyed at specific context, thus reducing the risk of miscommunication and potential catastrophic outcomes2. Finally, researchers have a habit of learning new tools and techniques for their projects; and there is no difference in learning some design tools and techniques for creating visuals.
But why, in reality, data (or an idea) is either poorly visualized or not visualized at all1? After interviewing several researchers, I find the problem comes down to this key question: how to create (good) visuals with the least amount of time and needed training? Creating visuals is important but usually not very urgent, which means that researchers naturally want to optimize the time and effort spent on this task. Typically, this means using the most familiar tools at hand, e.g., Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides, to create the visuals, quickly drafting and sketching the design, without iterating on the intermediate results, and reusing the same design for different contexts. They end up producing somewhat good but less satisfactory and even sometimes confusing visuals; and under certain situations, they might later need to rework the visuals, costing extra time and effort.
The objective of this class is to teach the minimal necessary skills to help researchers create good visuals quickly and efficiently. We have no intention to train you to become a professional designer (and those who have a strong design skill should probably skip this class); rather we want to help you grasp some key concepts and principles and learn certain tools and workflows that can facilitate your design and implementation process. In our context, ``visuals’’ can refer to both figures, diagrams, design of posters, animations in slides, or the visual presentation of tables, equations, and even text (e.g., typesetting). We hope that after taking this class, you can develop a systematic approach as well as learn some basic tools to create visuals that are clear, concise, and engaging; and ultimately, you will be more confident in this task and start to develop your own style and workflow.
There are going to be six units of this class, covering the fundamentals as well as concrete skills and techniques ranging from designing figures to creating animations. Some sessions will be taught in a workshop-fashion: we give a glimpse of the toolboxes and study how to create some good visuals with them. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, suggestions, or need any support for this class.
References
Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li, and Floraine Berthouzoz. Design principles for visual communication. Communications of the ACM, 54(4):60–69, 2011. ↩ ↩2
Wade Robison, Roger Boisjoly, David Hoeker, and Stefan Young. Representation and misrepresentation: Tufte and the morton thiokol engineers on the challenger. In Engineering Ethics, pages 121–143. Routledge, 2017. ↩