Cross-cultural Data Visualisation is an educational project on data visualisation and cultural design & collaboration. Students with a wide variety of cultural backgrounds from around the globe will work together and exchange data, using their cultural variety as a lens to learn from these differences.
The project is carried out and hosted by the Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) school and the Design Across Cultures track of the Digital Society School (DSS) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). It offers different types of collaboration with international partners, both online and offline. Please look at the paragraph on collaboration if you’re interested in working together and joining the program.
The project will run from February 7 till July 1 2022. It is loosely based on an earlier project we run in spring 2021, Cross-cultural Data Literacy but not an exact copy: We took the lessons learned from CCDL and applied it to develop an even better experience for all participants.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
We will focus on the themes of environmental issues and climate change and contribute to the according Sustainable Development Goals 13, 14 and 15. In collaboration with students with different cultural backgrounds, the participants will collect, exchange, interpret and visualize data on how climate change is affecting daily life. This can be open data from (local) governments and self-collected data that relate to the life and social environment of the students and teachers.
Data-humanism
We want create data stories from a human perspective. This means designing data visualisations representing the real lives of people and their behaviour. Students will learn how to empathize and reflect on differences and similarities and develop more culturally robust and inclusive data visualizations for social impact.
International team
The teachers and coaches of this project will experience how data literacy can be taught in an innovative way. We work together with teachers and coaches from different countries and cultures with the intention to learn from each other. We think learning is a life long experience, not only for students but for teachers a like.
Learning goals
- After joining the project, students will be able to:
- -Set up a methodology for collecting data, by doing fieldwork as well as by doing ‘open data’ deskresearch
- -Find angles for data stories in datasets
- -Identify ethical issues
- -Understand the SGDs and work on related data challenges in a culturally sensitive way
- -Empathize and reflect on differences and similarities and use these as a design strategy to develop more culturally sensitive (design) solutions.
- -Plan, organize and engage in constructive (online) conversations about data with people from another culture in support of the joint design purpose