Final Project

Persona- Our persona is called Amanda. Amanda is double majoring in Communications and Art History. She is twenty-years-old and is currently on her sophomore year at Roger Williams University. She is into fashion and likes to take classes that seem to be ‘fun’.

Background-When brainstorming ideas for our visual several topics came to mind. First and foremost, we wanted to include “Amanda” and thought about ways to engage her in the class. After creating her personality, we thought of how to present the information we learned in class to someone who was uneducated in the subject. Because of Amanda’s love for the outdoors, we wanted to incorporate a part of nature. A tree is representative of nature, and its ability to grow was an appropriate metaphor for how we grew with knowledge during this class.

Our initial idea was to review our notes as well as the text from class. We came up with the concept of writing facts on pieces of paper, and hanging them on a Christmas tree. The facts would provide the viewer with a brief outline of the topics discussed in class including: visualization, dual coding, usage of color, gestalt principles, mind maps, information graphics and Schriver’s model.

During the creation of our visual, collectively our group had an AHA moment. We decided it would be more effective to create a flow chart of information and place it on the tree, rather than placing random facts. We chose to a flow chart s a group because it seemed to be the easiest way for Amanda to understand what she will learn if she takes the class.

Our final idea- The main goal was to focus on the most important lessons that were taught throughout the semester. The terminators are the most important parts of the flow chart because without them, one would not know what the flow chart is about and what its purpose is. Therefore, they were colored yellow because it is the color that humans first pay attention to. The questions are colored red because it is a color that also catches attention (just not as much as red); the purpose of it is to make her stop and think about the question. The color red reminds people of the stop sign, so she would take the time to read the question and think about it. Green was selected as the process boxes color because it is complimentary to red, and contributes to the Christmas theme.

Conclusion- Overall, our graphic visual is a simple representation of what we learned. If any student like Amanda is interested in this subject, he or she could preview all the important information that he or she will learn. The flow chart provides viewers an easy way to understand the information and key terms learned throughout the semester.

 

For the multivariate display I chose to take my old graph of tuition cost over time and expand on it and add other data to give the increase in cost something to compare to. I chose to take out room and board and focus on the tuition cost in relation to the number of undergraduates and number of applicants each year. The graph goes from 1998 to 2008, but I had some trouble with the x-axis labels. I could not get them to change from 1-10 ans tried for a very long time and even got help, but they still would not change and I decided that it was better to not include the exact increments if they were going to be wrong. I chose these data sets because RWU has been increasing in size an creditability and I wanted to see if this follows the same pattern as increase in tuition cost. Both the number of applicants and the number of undergraduates has been steadily increasing along with tuition. The number of applicants has had a more drastic increase than the size of the student body, and that line better follows the pattern of tuition increase. This may be because as the University improves and becomes more competitive for admissions they can and need to increase the tuition cost for reasons such as more experienced professors and better facilities.