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Learning

The project taught me how to distinguish between effective and ineffective visualisations by deeply analysing examples. I realised that good visualisation often follows a logical set of design rules rather than relying on creative sparks alone. Preparing this presentation also helped me refine how I structure teaching material: beginning with problems, then showing the conceptual principles, and finally arriving at better solutions.

Impact

The presentation gave my students a solid conceptual foundation for approaching data visualisation. It helped them understand not just how to create visuals but how to interpret, critique them and improve them systematically.

Challenge

The biggest challenge was selecting and categorising examples from the enormous range of visualisations available. I had to build a clear structure that represented the most important ideas while staying teachable and engaging. Another challenge was balancing theory and practice, ensuring the presentation remained concrete enough to be useful while also covering conceptual depth.

Description

This project was a teaching presentation that explored the fundamentals of data visualisation. It started with the core question: why do we visualize data at all? The talk laid out multiple answers: to help communicate actual data or predictions or facilitate understanding trough simulations, storytelling and visualised algorithms. A central case study was the spaghetti chart problem, which describes overloaded line charts where individual patterns are impossible to distinguish. I used this example to show how poor design obscures meaning, and then introduced better approaches such as small multiples, highlighting, filtering, and combinations of these methods. The presentation also covered the importance of visual encodings (position, color, size, shape) and how they should be chosen. It moved into modern features such as interactivity and animation, and finally discussed the role of human perception, referencing Gestalt principles and design heuristics that explain how people interpret visual patterns.

Topics

Chart types, visual encoding, small multiples, human perception, gestalt design, good and bad visualisations

Tools

Conceptual frameworks

Year

2020 updated 2023

Clients

IE University, Arcada University, NOVA and more

Data Visualisation

A deep dive into why we visualize, how to avoid pitfalls like “spaghetti charts,” and how effective design and user-focused interactivity lead to successful data communication.

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