Samuel Slover
The world is awash with new data, but how can designers take the next step to make this data more meaningful in people’s day-to-day lives and interactions? Put differently, instead of giving people yet more data and visualizations to interpret, how can we personalize this data to provide simple insights that more intimately connect with what people really care about?
In this class, we’ll examine how personalized design can give people more meaningful and pleasant experiences with their data interactions. We’ll explore how new technologies and designs are implementing these personalization strategies and how they’re being successful (or not). The course will cover 3 main topic areas, each with a lecture and studio component:
- Making (Dry) Data Personal & Playful – Personality and playfulness can go a long way in creating richer interactions around data. We’ll examine how to make seemingly ‘boring’ data interesting through design and personalization strategies.
- Designing for the Self – It often helps to start by designing for our own problems. We’ll explore how to track and design around a dataset of our own that we’d like to better understand.
- Re-Contextualizing Everyday Data – Given the sheer number of daily data interactions, there’s so many opportunities to do it better. We’ll explore how to take data we encounter everyday (the weather, food labels, subway delays) and re-contextualize it to give people more pleasant and smarter interactions.
Students will learn techniques on how to work with existing Web APIs, how to build and use their own Web APIs (with Node.js and Mongodb), and will implement user-facing designs utilizing p5.js and other Web technologies. Class examples will be presented in Javascript. Javascript tutorials will be assigned as a pre-requisite for those with little to no Javascript experience.