INTelegance

After 3 years in the department I finally got around to submitting some T-Shirt designs for the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering’s yearly t-shirt contest.
Below are the designs:

post-rationalization

I wanted to build design that actually represented the students in the department visually. I chose two aspects to concentrate on when representing students in a visualization. The first was whether a student was computer science or computer engineering (here at UW, there is a lot of overlap … the distinction is minor, but fun to associate with oneself). The second was how long the student had been in the department. I pulled the data from the department’s class list and parsed it down to just these two bits of information.

In the trees on the shirt, each node represents one student. The color of the node represents CS/CE (which can be decoded from the color of the letter in the logo). The size of the node is representative of how long the student has been in the department. The longer enrolled the larger the node. The amount of time in the department decreases as the tree is traversed, putting the veterans near the root and the newbies on the leaves. Each sub-tree contains only CE or CS students, yet in line with the t shirt slogan, they all share the common singular root: University of Washington CSE.

process(ing.org)

I built this visualization using processing, an open source graphic prototyping environment built on Java. I borrowed heavily from Traer Physics and Traer Animation examples to create the simulation. The code is available here (warning, it is really rough):

processing source code

student data file

I hope they end on somebody’s body.