Data2Design Workshop

Workshop design

Needs assessment

Our needs assessment identified several core areas where respondents felt they could use help:

• Addressing different audiences, most notably the public, funding bodies, and students

• Respondents indicated that the lacked a basis in process, theory, and evidence when creating visuals

Goals of Data2Design

Informed by the needs assessment, we designed Data2Design to focus on core knowledge, strategies, and reusable design skills as applied to visual science communication. Our goals for this workshop include: 

• Providing insight into key design processes that are typically used to get better results

• Using active learning and co-creation methods that support those processes

• Exploring storytelling, in simple and more complex forms

• Introducing some core visual design strategies that can be used in creating figures

• Providing links to further resources

Workshop structure

Part 01.

Identifying audience needs and communication goals

One of the first steps of any design task is to identify the audience. The audience determines many aspects of our communication, such as the scope of our content and the method of communication. One useful strategy to determine the nature of our audience is to design personas. Based on this persona, we can more concretely define our communication goals.

Activity: Persona building and communication goals

Workshop attendees can use the activity below to develop personas and communication goals. Download worksheets for four different personas (funding bodies, general public (adult and child), and student) under Materials.

Part 02.

Applying storytelling techniques

Scientific storytelling, or narrative communication, encompasses the art of organizing complex information in a familiar, sequential format. This can take the form of both a spoken word or text story, as well as a visual story. We can think of scientific storytelling as a useful framework for organizing information — it can give a familiar structure to our communication by always keeping our audience’s attention at the forefront. 

Visual science storytelling involves arranging carefully-chosen elements to convey a specific sequence of events or a take-home message. There are 5 key steps for visual science storytelling:

1. Define the audience.

2. Determine if we're telling a simple or complex visual story.

3. Curate key pieces of information for the audience to understand the topic.

4. Consider the visual elements, icons, and text that will guide the audience’s attention.

5. Determine a logical reading order and layout for our visual story according to the visual elements identified.

Once we have chosen our story elements, we can plan for the overall visualization. We create multiple thumbnails sketches - small, rough schematics of the visualization - to experiment with different layouts and arrangements of the story elements. Thumbnails help us identify and solve spatial issues before we finalize our story.

Activity: Thumbnailing scientific visualizations

Workshop attendees can use the activity below to practice planning a simple visual story using thumbnails. Download this worksheet under Materials.

Part 03.

Applying visual design techniques

As scientific visual communicators, our goal is to make appropriate design decisions to ensure that our ideas and scientific findings can be easily interpreted by our audience. Understanding features of human perception allows us to make better design decisions - and, with proper and thoughtful application of design principles, we can leverage the different ways our eyes see and our brain interprets the world in order to guide our audience’s experience of processing visual information.

This workshop tackles the following design principles:

• Perceptibility (simultaneous contrast, colour constancy)

• Manipulation of visual properties (contrast, proximity, alignment, and repetition).

Activity: Figure redesign

The activity below asks attendees to apply all of their workshop learnings by re-designing a graphical abstract about drug-protein binding. It includes a variety of assets that attendees can rearrange to practice creating an effective visualization. Download this worksheet and companion assets under Materials.

Acknowledgements

Data2Design was led by Prof. Nicholas Woolridge (PI), managed by Maeve Doyle, designed and facilitated by Neramy Ganesan, Emily Tjan, Tunyalux Langsub, Samantha Li, Anais Lupu, Amy Zhu, and Amy Zhang. We'd like to thank Avila Sanchez, Andrew Janaczek, Viktoriya Khymych, and Xinyi Li for pilot-testing this workshop, and Brendan Lazar and Vadym Lytvynov for contributing to the workshop design.