Critical Data Viz
W. E. B. Du Bois, Charting Black Lives
The password for these Figma files is pratt.
Assignment
Due: Nov 3, 2026
Continue developing your Project 2: Data Sculpture. This week, focus on what you want the work to communicate. Decide what you want someone to notice, understand, or question when they encounter your sculpture, and refine the work around that intention.
- What does your sculpture reveal about the data? What position does it take through the way you have chosen to represent it?
- How do your mappings, material, scale, and arrangement support that position? What do they emphasize, leave out, or risk oversimplifying?
- How can someone read the work without your explanation? Develop legends that make its data, mappings, and context legible while supporting the experience of the sculpture.
Use these decisions to refine your code, physical form, and presentation. Document the changes you make and prepare the display materials listed below.
Open Classroom Preparation
For Open Classroom, prepare:
- Physical artifacts. Your project cannot be digital only. You are encouraged to use code as the initial tool for designing the system, then translate the data into physical artifacts. These can be prints, clay, or another material that supports your project.
- Your coding sketch and raw data. Prepare to present the artifacts alongside the system that generated them and the data behind it.
- Legends. Help viewers understand how to read the work, including the data source, units, and how values become visual or physical properties. Consider how the legends relate to the sculpture and its presentation.
- A printed object label. Include your name, the title of your piece, and a short description of your data-driven design system. Explain what the data is about and how it becomes the work viewers are seeing. Design the label to sit alongside your artifacts for Open Classroom.
Readings
- Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
- Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data, Peter A. Hall and Patricio Dávila
- “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman
- Every Datapoint a Person, Data by Design
- Between Data and Truth, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Data Portraits”, Data by Design