Communication Design Faculty Census 2018

Creative Brief

Crafted Product

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Link to → Interactives 2022 style update: first three tabs. I revisited the crafting of the main interactives.

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Link to → Communication Design Faculty Census 2018 This is a collaborative academic project. I prototyped and designed the dashboards for a nationwide census.

Tablet or desktop views

Style updates: 2022. These interactives work in a tablet view.

Mobile views

An overview of the 2018 mobile views, with my favorite interactives and how the tooltips work. The interactives were designed thinking that most people would view them on their phones. This created a constraint in the design and style.

Goal

The Design Incubation team collected responses from a nationwide survey of Design Educators:

Link to → Design Educators Census

Design Incubation reached out to me to:

Visualize the data in meaningful ways.
Get info from the census out to faculty.

In the words of Design Incubation:

"The Faculty Census gathers information about trends affecting design faculty. Participants included full and part-time faculty at U.S. colleges and universities. All data contributions are anonymous and used exclusively for research purposes.

The following graphics and charts are based on data gathered in the first faculty census. They were developed to help visualize and evaluate different types and patterns of activities engaged in by faculty and administrators and to investigate the conditions of their employment. We aim to reveal factors associated with academia that might be used for individual or institutional decision-making. This includes but is not limited to college and university budget planning, legislative agendas, anticipating shifts in student body makeup, etc.

Our ultimate goal is to help faculty to understand the landscape of higher education within their discipline and to use data to proactively plan for and/or to react to shifts in thinking about the role of a design educator within the academy. The Carnegie Classification®

Many of the graphics developed for the 2018 Faculty Census use the Carnegie Classification® as a system for comparison. The Carnegie Classification® has been the leading framework for recognizing and describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education for the past four and a half decades.

The framework is widely used in the study of higher education, both as a way to represent and control for institutional differences, and also in the design of research studies to ensure adequate representation of sampled institutions, students, or faculty. Looking up your own institution can help you understand which classification applies to you personally and may help inform your understanding of the visualizations from the Faculty Census."

Role

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Link to → Communication Design Faculty Census 2018 This is a collaborative academic project. I prototyped and designed the dashboards for a nationwide census.

Design Incubation: Professor Aaris Sherin & Professor Dan Wong

"Design Incubation is a venue for educators and practitioners of Communication Design to discuss design research and practice. Our aim is to create a community where designers can assess creative work through a lens of scholarly activity and academic review."

Steve Wexler, Data Revelations: Survey design expert (consulted about the data structure and best practices for survey design)

Process

Discovery

Observations

👀

Our main discussion revolved around creating a useful tool for exploration. Although most dashboards are used in Desktop view, I discovered that this dashboard needed to also be readable at a mobile-first level, given how many people would view it on the phone.

👂

In conversation with the Design Incubation team, I developed a useful mobile-first dashboard that progresses through all of the relevant questions. The dashboard would need to begin with demographics and proceed toward exploratory tools, for faculty to discover relationships between multiple categories.

📊

The survey questions and data can be found below:

Communication Design Faculty Census.pdf70.6KB

Design Census.csv117.6KB

The data required a lot of restructuring so that it could be in a format to be visualized. From this project, I learned the intricacies of this process to structure survey data for visualization. Survey design expert Steve Wexler walked me through the process, and I was able to learn how to do it for myself.

🖍️

This dashboard was intended to be a 1.0 prototype. A more aesthetic version would have been the next step, which I intend to include in my dossier this winter.

Concepts → Blueprint

The final visualizations in the tabbed Dashboard are my favorite designs and also the most useful tools for personalizing the experience for exploration and insight. In addition to the interactives, the charts can be downloaded in PDF format or as images.

Approach

Design Census 2021.pdf247.6KB

This chart visualizes the Likert scale responses using a diverging bar chart.

This chart visualizes the gap in responses about activities institutions value.

This barbell chart visualizes the gap in salaries according to a range of factors.

Reflection

💭

This project led me to research how survey design works, and the assumptions and methods that yield responses. with gratitude to Steve Wexler of Data Revelations, I learned how to structure survey data in a way to yield insightful visualizations.