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Educators can leverage a variety of process models to scaffold students from beginning designer practices to practices aligned with more experienced designers. The Center for Socially Engaged Design at the University of Michigan developed a Socially Engaged Design (SED) Process Model to explicitly emphasize important aspects of design that are often underemphasized or not included in commonly-used design process model visualizations, including, for example, designers embracing the limitations of their own perspective and acknowledging the power they hold, the benefits of integrating contextual considerations, and the use of prototypes throughout a design process rather than as single phase in a design process. To better understand the role of design process models, broadly, and the perceived value of process models that emphasize the importance of people and context in design work, specifically, we investigated upper-level mechanical engineering students' perceptions of this SED Process Model’s visualization. Our findings from this initial exploratory study showed both variability and several consistent themes in participants’ perceptions, for example, there were several interpretations of relationships between different aspects of the model, iteration in design was salient to all participants, and while this SED Process Model’s visualization does have recommendations, several participants noted it does not specify exactly how to achieve those recommendations. Understanding engineering students’ perceptions of this SED Process Model’s visualization can help us (1) iterate on the process model’s visualization and (2) better understand how to leverage multiple process model visualizations in engineering curricula.
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A domain-specific language for exploratory data visualization
With an ever-growing amount of collected data, the importance of visualization as an analysis component is growing in concert. The creation of good visualizations often doesn't happen in one step but is rather an iterative and exploratory process. However, this process is currently not well supported in most of the available visualization tools and systems. Visualization authors are forced to commit prematurely to particular design aspects of their creations, and when exploring potential variant visualizations, they are forced to adopt ad hoc techniques such as copying code snippets or keeping a collection of separate files. We propose variational visualizations as a model supporting open-ended exploration of the design space of information visualization. Together with that model, we present a prototype implementation in the form of a domain-specific language embedded in Purescript.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717300
- PAR ID:
- 10096844
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3278122.3278138
