Class 4: Brainstorming

The following are the links to working versions of each of the data visualizations and notes about each visualization.

To get access to the code behind the examples, you'll need to download it from A Taste of D3's GitHub site.

A) Inspirations

Let's spend the first half of the class looking at examples that can help inspire us and show us a broader rannge of what's possible to do in D3:

• Examples of what D3 can do
• An example of how to be playful with data

B) Brainstorming: Shiny, Strategic, Scalable, Safe

Now it's time to do our first brainstorming session. According to the Shiny Object Task Force, when you're considering creating a data viz that's beyond your typical bar chart, it should meet three criteria:

• Shiny: Fun, pretty, playful, etc.
• Strategic: Would actually be useful for your unit and/or ASHA -- help to obtain a specific goal, better understand/visualize a problem, etc.
• Scalable/Sustainable: Not too difficult to update, and if possible parts or all of it could be reused

For A Taste of D3, we're going to add a fourth S:

• Safe: Since you're new and nobody at ASHA is an expert at D3, now's not the time to come up with something splashy for the Convention. Pick a project that's clearly experimental, that has no hard deadlines -- where you have plenty of room to fail if you need it.

Now that you know what objectives you need to meet, what ideas do you have for some problems where a solution might be something fun in D3? Today, you don't need to worry about exactly what D3 visualization you want to build. All you need is a general sense of the kind of problem you want to solve and a few wisps of ideas of what you might want to explore to solve them.