One of the things I’ve long wanted to spend more time diving into is data visualization. There’ve been an increasing number of great examples online, and I’m interested because it’s a powerful way to convey complex situations, it combines visual design and data, because I hoped my general aptitude for technology would make it easy for me to produce amazing stuff easily, and because I figured that it’d be a comparatively uncommon skill that could give me a leg up come job hunting season. (This was validated by at least one person I’d love to work for.)
And then it seemed to make perfect sense that this would be a great thing for me to learn while doing a graduate degree at OCAD. And especially so since the Director of Research at sLab (where the SFI program is housed) has a particular interest in visualization. Still, the opportunity didn’t present itself automatically, and so I decided that this semester I’d formalize it by doing a ‘directed study’ on information visualization.
“Information” instead of “data,” for two reasons: the SFI program has a general bias towards the qualitative, and because I had a few projects in mind that were more design-y and less data-y.
I’ve got a backlog of posts about how this directed study has been going, but I’ll split those up into other posts.
