Visualizing connections amongst the attendees of DesignUp
DesignUp is an annual Indian design conference with a line up of inspiring speakers and exciting workshops. In the 2018 edition, there was a scholarship program consisting of writing, sketch noting, photography and installation.
I was lucky to be selected as a part of this program under Rasagy’s mentorship.
We came up with ideas as to what could be achieved using data as a raw material. We wanted to try and make an installation for the conference …
… or collect data during the event and make something after.
Can we connect people?
Amongst all these ideas: we felt that visualizing connections between attendees of the conference based on their interests and aspirations would be fun and interesting.
Designing the visualization
Our concept revolved around using a network visualization. I started learning a bit of graph theory and exploring d3-force. I’m a novice when it comes to d3 and this was a good chance to learn more.
The crux was deciding which encoding method and force layout could be used and developed right in time for the event.
Understanding the force
d3-force is a rudimentary physics engine with forces acting on and controlling the particles. Tweaking these forces was a key component of the visualization.
How does it work?
The idea was to ask 3 quick questions to the attendee and immediately visualize their connections with other folks in the conference, who are interested in the same things as they are.
These connections are redrawn using d3’s enter-update-exit pattern:
Let’s have a quick walkthrough:
Nimble learnings
A few tiny observations that we made during the whole experiment.
This was my first time at DesignUp. There were amazing talks by inspiring people. Good food too ;) It was so much fun interacting with enthusiastic people who were very curious and encouraging.
My gratitude to:
- DesignUp team for giving me a chance to do this
- Rasagy for mentoring and supporting throughout
- Gurman for a lot of advice, feedback and ideas
- Nitin for the constant critique. Do check out his installation: Piano man
- Aromal and Reetika for all the photos and encouragement
This post was featured on The DesignUp Website (which also has videos of talks from 2017 and 2018)
