Learn how to approach data visualisation inventively and develop your own visual language through hand-drawing with designer Stefanie Posavec.

If you’re already working with data, be it for work presentations or a personal blog, you will understand the importance of visual representation to quickly grasp complex subject matters.

This masterclass with designer Stefanie Posavec focuses on the creative benefits of starting to work with data by hand, with an emphasis on how to create new custom languages for data visualisation.

Data is often dealt with digitally and rarely engaged with in a tangible, physical way. How would your approach and sensibility within a data project change if you started working with charcoal and paper instead of code and screens?

By taking techniques from the world of art and design and applying them to data, you will explore ways of using traditional methods and materials as a starting point for creating data-driven visual systems.

You will be working off-screen, using nothing more than basic drawing materials. By the end of this workshop, you'll have access to a different starting process for working with data and shaping its aesthetic.

Content

Why draw data by hand?
Rule-based drawing as an approach to data visualisation
Data-drawing bootcamp: an intensive session merging traditional drawing exercises with data, to build creative confidence and encourage experimentation
Applying a creative approach to data visualisation
How to determine the architecture of your data-drawing
Anatomy of a data visualisation

This course is for you if...

You understand the basic principles and functions of data visualisation, perhaps using it regularly in your day job, but would like to learn how to move beyond the traditional bar charts to new visualisation methods.
You normally work with data on screen and would like to explore a more hands-on approach to data visualisation.

Tutor profile

Stefanie Posavec is a designer whose favoured material is data. Her projects include data visualisation, information design and commissioned data art. She recently completed Dear Data, a year-long drawing project, in collaboration with designer Giorgia Lupi. Over the fifty-two weeks, each collected data about their lives, before translating this information into a hand-drawn visualisation on a postcard and sending it to the other. This project was honoured by a nomination for the Design Museum's 'Designs of the Year 2016' award and is now held in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York. Stefanie’s work has been exhibited internationally at major galleries, including MoMA, the Science Gallery in Dublin and the V&A, the Science Museum, Southbank Centre and Somerset House in London. In 2013, she was Facebook's first data-artist-in-residence at the company’s Menlo Park campus.

Full course and returns information on the Masterclasses website

A creative approach to data: hand-drawn data visualisation