(sorry this got posted a day early to the site!)
PROCESS INSTRUCTIONS (time required: 3-4 hours over 2-3 days): You are tasked 
with designing a personal statistics poster as part of the Quantified Self Movement. RIMOSA has asked you to draft a simple poster to be featured onsite and online. The museum wants a simple display of information that is relatable to the average young adult’s life who may not have access to Fitbit or other tracking devices. They want a young person to be curious about their own habits by reading your poster. Your mission is to show how much an average person can consume or produce (in energy, work, hours, etc.) over any amount of time (a day, a year, a week). There is potential to earn an extra token (see below).
You must create charts and tables using a spreadsheet program, like Google Sheets or Excel, to visualize your data. More aesthetic charts can be made with free online infographic creators (e.g. infogram, vengage). WTFcsv is a good resource for seeing alternative visualizations choices.
Rhetorical Situation:
- Purpose: Learn to make observations and create data visualizations using four visual representations as discussed in the Holmes reading: tables, line, bar, and pie charts.
- Audience: General public who are uninformed about the quantities (of information, energy, work) an average young adult consumes and produces.
- Context: A simple poster (no larger than 11″x17″) to be displayed at a distance of 6 feet away.
Day 1: Explore data
- Decide on the story you want to tell about activities you can measure easily by yourself. What questions do you have about your habits? What type of information would be most helpful to know about? Think about a potential audience for your work. What data is interesting or appealing to your target audience? Identify some nice visual representations that can give context to the message.
- Get data by tracking your habits. Log your consumption of media, calories, water, or energy usage over a day or two. Also, log how much production you create regularly (e.g. emails, phone calls, words, credits, courses, hours),
- List your consumption activities over a day. Create a list documenting how often resources were used.
- Make another list for your productive activities. How many words, emails, drawings, sketches, etc, do you produce over a specified time?
- Transcribe this information into a spreadsheet program.
- Organize your data: Estimate what your average usage/production numbers are. Determine usage or production over a week, month, or year. Convert these numbers into relatable or experiential units (e.g.How much is your consumption/productivity worth in waste, hours, money, or how much is your production worth)? For example, investigate your resource consumption. Make estimates for common appliances or look them up online (for calculating water or energy use). Calculate similar estimates for your productivity (use your pay stubs, calendar, or course transcripts to figure this out). Try a good estimation site for experiential units (e.g. “your yearly water usage is about the size of a small lake.”)
- Try different data visualizations. Create some visualizations of your data. Experiment with color, line styles, line widths, and different fonts. Create the following labeled representations for productivity and consumption:
- table
- bar chart
- pie chart
- line chart
- other types of charts, e.g. stacked bar charts… see what the spreadsheet program offers.
- Create a combined slide with all four types of visualizations for each scenario.
- Upload these two composite slides for your blog. If your table is too big, use a snapshot of the first few rows of data.
- Identify your key message. Select one best visualization for consumption or productivity. Identify your target audience for this poster. Choose the right visual symbols to integrate with the poster. What is the narrative that would connect the information to the human issue behind the data?
- Sketch at least three thumbnail sketches showing how the elements may be laid out for the poster. Refer to Holmes’ design principles and combine your charts with imagery to create a single-page infographic. Give yourself a night’s rest to think about the design of your poster. Think about whether you are using the best visual form. Do you need a common abscissa for both charts? Does the scale make sense? Upload your thumbnail sketches.
Day 2: Create your final poster (with titles and labeled axes) to inform the public about a person’s activities.
- Finalize your design. Think about the readability, clarity, and layout of your poster. Add any text and/or symbols to draw the cognitive thread through the poster. Reduce words inside the chart, and add annotations as needed.
- Upload your final image to your blog. Write your blog. If desired, attempt the token below.
TOKEN Option: To earn a token, transform your data into an infographic. An infographic is a poster that combines lots of data (information) with graphics to tell a story to motivate audiences to action. You can add additional external data to your infographic., as long as you cite them in your references.
- Think about your key message. An infographic is designed to inform readers about some idea or problem. What additional data will support your argument? Think about photos, quotes, symbols, isotypes, etc.
- Create the call to action for your infographic. A call to action influences the readers to take action based on your infographic. Add this to your visual (e.g.a phone number, a website, ask them to sign a petition).
- Add at least three more sketch thumbnails before attempting a final layout.
- Refer to Holmes as you combine the elements to create a single-page infographic. Export this slide as a high-resolution image and upload to your blog.
Write a 250+ word blog post reflecting on your design process. Please include the following:
- Include the following high-resolution, properly rotated images:
- your raw data, with calculations of your productivity and consumption
- Consumption slide with four types of visualizations
- Productivity visualizations with four types of visualizations
- 3+ thumbnail arrangement sketches
- A final infographic 11″x17″ poster design containing charts and call-to-action
- Citations to any images, calculators, and references you used.
- Citations to tools and resources you used if they were not Google Sheets, Google Slides, Excel, or Photoshop.
- Fill out this checklist after you have completed your assignment and posted it in your Portfolio Blog: