CS 767/867 Assignment 1. Due Monday Sept 7 at 10.00 pm

Visual Thinking Tools

The goal of this assignment is to start you thinking about visualizations as visual thinking tools. Your task is to find and briefly describe an example of a thinking tool that has a visual interface. Try not to be too generic (e.g. not diagrams in general, but a furniture assembly diagram). Examples: A road map, a weather map, a class structure diagram, a UML diagram, a notebook, a diagram (assembly instructions, anatomical, etc.), a calendar, a trend graph, a bar graph, a control panel, an information dashboard.

Email an image and a one page summary of the cognitive system components embodied in the example. The one page summary should use the following categories.

Name the tool and the variant you are thinking of.

What are the thinking tasks this tools supports (1). Focus on a small number <3 and briefly describe them.

How does your example support interactive computation? If it doesn't suggest ways that it might (2).

What visual patterns are important? (3)

Notes

(1) Tasks: both computer interface design and visualization design can only be done if the designer has an idea of the task the tool is intended to support. Almost all computer based tools and many other tools are designed to support thinking tools.

Example: Finding the best way of getting from Portland, Maine to Burlington,Vermont using a map.

(2) Computation is often distributed between the human and a computer. Typical computational support includes information search, calculation, route finding. In all cases embedded knowledge is involved (whose is it?).

(3) The reason why data visualizations are useful is that they enable us to answer questions and solve problems through visual pattern searches. (E.g. comparison between the areas of segments of a pie chart. E.g. finding a connected series of lines in a road map tells us the route between two cities.

Note: you will be responsible for a brief, (5 min) in-class presentation of your findings.

Note: email reports to cware@ccom.unh.edu