Digital Learning, Copenhagen 2020 Summer Workshop: Visualizing Systems

Unravel complex systems and visualize their interactions. Experiment and reimagine them through interventions, algorithms, models, and simulations. Communicate your understanding through powerful system visualizations.

Workshop Dates: July 20–24, 2020 (2 pm–10 pm CEST)

Faculty: Annelie Berner & Francis Tseng

What is Data Visualization?

We are constantly moving within and taking part in dizzyingly complex systems. We often talk of these systems separately, as if they were distinct–the economy, the environment, the law, technology, politics, social life–though we also know they are, in our experience of them, fundamentally inseparable. That we easily experience these systems but have such a hard time understanding them is no doubt a source of great anxiety. How do we make sense of them? How might designing and visualizing a system in one way or another shift the possible futures in which we will live?

This workshop will draw on a variety of disciplines that attempt to tackle this challenge–in particular: visualization, modeling, and simulation. We will walk through how to think about such systems in a way that helps us to communicate them in a way that develops intuitions about how they work.

What will you learn?

• How to collect, classify, and encode data
• Processes to expose system workings
• How to design and interpret algorithms, models, and simulations
• How to think through and represent complex systems
• The foundations of data visualization
• Using metaphor, visual relationships, mapping and interaction to make meaning out of data
• Skills to tell a story with data
• Analog and digital techniques for making visualizations

How will you learn it?

During this 5 day workshop, we will use analog and digital techniques to practice collecting, classifying, and encoding data. We will experiment with analog and digital techniques for explaining, exploring, and presenting complex systems. We will work through research, design, and representation of multiple complex systems. The course will involve drawing, prototyping, and programming using both static and dynamic information. We will gather around the core topics of seeing the unseen, computation, and system visualization. In seeing the unseen, you will learn processes to disentangle and research the components, agents, dynamics, and forces that compose multiple systems — spanning political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental forces. In computation, we will go more deeply into algorithms and simple models, designing our own algorithms in order to shape the systems towards our goals. In visualization, you will create several visual representations of said systems and iterate for a final presentation.

Is this for you?

Yes, if you want to understand systems better and create visualizations of them.

There are no prerequisites for this workshop.

What do you need to bring to the workshop?

• A computer
• Notebook & pen

Enroll now: There is a maximum number of 20 places available for each workshop, first come first served. Enrollment will be closed when the workshops are full.