Data Comics Workshop

This workshop was part of an assignment in 3rd-year Illustration students at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh in October 2018. More information can be found in our publcaton.

Wang, Z., Dingwall, H. and Bach, B., 2019, May. Teaching data visualization and storytelling with data comic workshops. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-9).

Findings in a Nutshell

• Provided data was well appreciated but required significant time to wrap one’s head around it.
• Participants had problems creating compelling stories and wanted more guidance on this.
• Though we conducted a visualization sketching session at the beginning, participants new to visualizations still had some troubles using purposeful visualizations in their stories.
• Designing compelling layouts that reflect the story-flow was not covered enough through the design patterns .

Design

The design for this workshop was informed by two preceding workshops on data comics at the University of Edinburgh. Both workshops borrowed methodology from several related workshops.

Material:

A3-size paper, sketch pen, sticky posts

Data Cards, Scenario Cards, Data comics design Patterns

Actvities

• Introduction of data, messages and visualization (30min)
• Introduction to data comics (20min)
• Sketching (30min)
• Creating a data story (40min)
• Storyboard sketch (20min)

• Exhibition and presentation (10min)

• Introduction of RAWGraph (10min)
• Story creating (140min) with 10min break
• Walk-through crit (5min)