Courses

Project course on visualizing a Jewish diaspora photo archive with Frédéric Brenner & GraDiM. Teams design novel visual overviews and data stories, linking semantics, relations, and visuals. The course work spans data analysis to prototypes, yielding a research paper and web prototype.

This course embraces the web as a versatile and expressive medium for creating information-rich and dynamic interfaces. From buttons and boxes to events and animation, students will learn the basic building blocks for prototyping interactive web pages for diverse audiences and platforms.

Students learn to identify deceptive interface elements and patterns. We will take interfaces, un-design them, and put them back together to contextualize their influence on us. Using critical design, data visualization and creative coding we design essays that expose these issues and explain them.

This course provided insights into European art and dress history from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, art historical methodology and terminology. Three visualisation tools developed at UCLAB were used to construct argumentations about the artworks.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

In this introductory course students learn to design, build, and critique data visualizations. Lectures cover the basic principles including visual variables, interactivity, temporal, geospatial, multidimensional, relational, and text visualization. Tutorials help create a personal data dossier.

This course investigates interconnections between human and non-human actors, futures and pasts, technologies, capital, politics, and the environment. We develop non-linear narrative forms to communicate these complex interdependencies and work experimentally with data, images, film, and sound.

Participants were tasked with creating and illustrating a flowchart about a dilemma of their choice, narrating a path through the chart using an audio recording, and making their creations interactive using a provided template.

Experimental design course on the visualization of organizational structures to encourage reflection and imagination about work and the economy. The course was held as a nomadic seminar at multiple locations in Berlin and Potsdam.

Self-organized reading seminar on information visualization. Students pick recent papers, discuss reflections, and write a survey paper, applying infovis insights to data storytelling, generative art, science communication, digital humanities, critical design.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (since 2014) brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.

Experimental design course exploring the concept of decolonization through the lens of data visualization and vice versa, examining how power structures and visualization design intersect.

Self-organized reading seminar on information visualization. Students pick recent papers, discuss reflections, and write a survey paper, applying infovis insights to data storytelling, generative art, science communication, digital humanities, critical design.

Networks are everywhere—from social media and history to biology and transport. Yet large networks often turn into unreadable “hair balls.” This course focused on designing experimental visualizations that highlight meaningful data relations on a self-chosen topic.

The aim in the course was to design and prototype a text-based information system in Virtual Reality. Students investigated challenges and opportunities, then created prototypes for immersive environments—exploring layout, readability, spatial structure, interaction, and typographic rules.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

Self-organized reading seminar on information visualization. Students pick recent papers, discuss reflections, and write a survey paper, applying infovis insights to data storytelling, generative art, science communication, digital humanities, critical design.

The summer school focusses on visualizing open access in Germany (Open Access Bundesländer-Atlas) and beyond to raise awareness of this transformation in academic publishing.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

Sensors are more and more pervasive in our everyday life. What happens if we use them to monitor subjective experiences? “Data Talks / Data Walks” is a hybrid exercise combining journalism, data visualization and coding.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (since 2014) brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.

In this seminar, students of communication and interface design have developed visual data essays that take a look at System Earth in the age of the Anthropocene and show practical opportunities for action in critical times.

By “stones that calculate,” we refer to all information-processing devices and infrastructures of our automated society, built from (rare) earths. From iPhones to data centers, we explore the ecological, political, and material dependencies behind everyday tech.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

Students from various disciplines create visual data essays at the intersection of editorial design and information visualization. In teams, they explore intersectionality by making the interplay of different forms of discrimination tangible through concrete examples.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

In the course, students will develop visualizations that enable users to explore, understand, and use climate scenarios.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (since 2014) brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.

Project course devoted to the visual analysis and communication of urban data with the goal to engage in critical reflections about the future of cities. Students of interface design and urban futures form interdisciplinary teams to pursue research and design at the intersection of their fields.

Course on introduction to information visualization with D3.js.

Course exploring the visualization of literary narratives in collaboration with the University of Hamburg.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (since 2014) brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.

The course investigates how abstract data can be transformed into spatial structures. The aim was to create objects of a high aesthetic quality, to convey a message and to have a narrative angle that enable people to both understand a certain fact and to experience data in a spatial environment.

This course introduces the fundamentals of web development.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (since 2014) brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.

This course was a two-weeks introduction to the world of web mapping and geospatial data visualization. We explored different urban and social phenomena by mapping highly contrasting datasets (“zebra”-style), which can tell interesting stories about our world.

The project course »Visualizing Cultural Collections« brings together students from design, media studies, information science, and cultural management to analyze interfaces and develop new approaches with cultural institutions.