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Data Sketches

This is an ongoing project.

Hand-drawn sketches, such as those on napkins and whiteboards, are commonly used as part of everyday thinking processes. These types of sketches can be thought of as spontaneously created representations of ideas and concepts, but can also be applied to data. Our question is whether a better understanding of sketched data representations can contribute a new perspective on our visual representation repertoire.

 

 

Hand-drawn sketches, such as those on napkins and whiteboards, are commonly used as part of everyday thinking processes. These types of sketches can be thought of as spontaneously created representations of ideas and concepts, but can also be applied to data. Our question is whether a better understanding of sketched data representations can contribute a new perspective on our visual representation repertoire. To explore this, we conducted a qualitative study in which we asked people to manually sketch representations of a small, understandable dataset and to report on what they learned or found interesting about the data.