Cascade is improving data literacy amongst designers, so they can explain information faster and clearer.
This series aims to improve the way you present information and help you increase comprehension about what you're designing. We want you to understand how to process large amounts of information to compare, contrast, and grasp the greater whole of data.
We've assembled a lineup filled with industry leaders including data scientists, designers, and engineers, in order to give you the full-spectrum of what it takes to design an effective visualization. Big thanks to Quantcast for hosting and sponsoring this event.
The Stars of the Show:
Monday, March 6, 2017
Theme: Collecting, Strategizing & Asking the Right Questions
Schedule:
6:00PM Doors open. Food, drinks & networking
7:00PM "Collaborating with a Data Scientist" with Erin Akinci
7:45PM "Data Fundamentals: Principles of Good Analysis" with Danny Hernandez
"Collaborating with a Data Scientist"
Erin Akinci
Data Scientist at Asana
In this presentation, Erin Akinci, Data Scientist at Asana, shares her process and techniques of working in collaboration with product and research teams to gain a deep understanding of how their customers interact with their software. Erin works with a team of product managers, user researchers, engineers, and designers to:
"Data Fundamentals: Principles of Good Analysis"
Danny Hernandez
Data Scientist at Twitch
Danny Hernandez will teach you how to take a step back and strategically analyze the information at hand. He'll review:
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Theme: Infographics, Charts & Graphs
Schedule:
6:00PM Doors open. Food, drinks & networking
6:45PM "Communicating Visually with Data" with Kiera Westphal
7:45PM "Interaction Design for Data Visualization" with Miles McCrocklin
"Communicating Visually with Data"
Kiera Westphal
Visual Product Designer for Data
Indepedent Design Consultant
Kiera shares her experience working for the Chicago Tribune as a visual journalist and how she has found it useful in the UX process.
She will also introduce visual principles then provide context within projects she's worked on including financial software, charts and graphs for dashboards, and printed reports.
"Interaction Design for Data Visualization"
Miles McCrocklin
Data Visualization Designer at Facebook
Interactivity is often overlooked as a vital component of data visualization, but it is essential to move visual work from providing information to supplying insight. This talk will cover the basic principles of interaction design – from Fitts's Law to creating an interactive grammar for exploration, explore several case studies, and, finally, discuss methods to assess the effectiveness of interaction design.
We will go beyond tooltips, brushing, and scrolling, and look at the principles behind these techniques, looking at work from Heer, Bostock, and others. In addition to learning best practices, and seeing them in the context of well-known products, we develop a framework for interaction criticism; ways to assess interaction utility and effectiveness.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Theme: Prototyping Visualizations, Tools, and Software
Schedule:
6:00PM Doors open. Food, drinks & networking
6:30PM "Informing Business Decisions with Data Viz." with Mike Terry & Jake Pollard
7:00PM Prototyping & Telling a Story with Data – from Python to Sketch to D3" with Nilkanth Patel
8:00PM "Designing Data Tools for Enterprise" with Jérôme Cukier"
"Informing Business Decisions with Data Visualizations"
Mike Terry (Technical CoFounder + Engineer) & Jake Pollard (Data Scientist)
Lawfty
Mike Terry (Engineer) and Jake Pollard (Data Scientist) from Lawfty share how data visualizations and specific tools improve collaboration and communication across their 3 remote offices.
They’ll teach us how they use:
"Prototyping & Telling a Story with Data – from Python to Sketch to D3"
Nilkanth Patel
Data Visualization Designer
Quantcast
Neel will go through the process of sifting through data to uncover the right way to explain its significance. Doing it right takes time, patience, and requires everything from Python to Sketch to D3. He’ll go through one of his past projects and elaborate on how a disciplined approach, with the help of the right tools, can help you find the story you should tell.
"Designing Data Tools for Enterprises"
Jérôme Cukier
Senior Engineer & Visualization Designer
Uber
Data tools can be external-facing web page like Google Analytics or Yahoo Finance or internal sites accessible to a few people. When designed correctly, visualization tools can deliver business insights fast and simplify the process of analyzing big data sets. They can also uncover patterns, trends, and relationships that would go unnoticed with text-based data.
In this presentation, Jerome will teach us about different tools to make large amounts of information easy to digest. He’ll show us what works and what doesn’t, and explain why.
About Our Speakers
Danny Hernandez
Data Scientist
Twitch
Danny Hernandez joined Twitch five years ago when it was still codenamed Xarth. As a data scientist he focuses on influencing product decisions with evidence. He finds a problem in the data and takes that all the way to a solution through prototyping, UX, research, influence, and product management. Recently he's focused on teaching Twitch and other organizations to make better decisions and communicate more clearly by predicting the future. He has a master's in mechanical engineering from MIT. He regularly posts his work and thoughts on medium, twitter, and whale.
Erin Akinci
Data Scientist
Asana
Erin Akinci works as a data scientist at Asana, primarily focusing on helping the mobile team make data-driven product decisions and building out data pipelines for the data team’s new Spark cluster . Prior to her time at Asana, she worked as a food chemist discovering aromas that make food taste sweeter or saltier. Outside of work, she enjoys weaving, growing vegetables and writing scripts to predict the matches on Are You the One?.
Miles McCrocklin
Data Visualization
Facebook
Miles is building products with Data Visualization at Facebook. He has been an active member of the data community for the past five years, regularly giving talks, teaching, and organizing meetups for SF Data Mining, Bay Area d3 User Group, and d3.unconf().
Miles graduated from Georgia Tech with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Machine Learning.
In his free time, you'll see him with a camera traveling and exploring.
Kiera Westphal
Visualization Designer
Consultant
Kiera Westphal is a Visual Product Designer with over 10 years experience in Visual Storytelling, UX and Data Visualization. She has a passion for synthesizing a clear representation of complex information.
Kiera graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BFA in Communication Design, focusing her studies on successfully bringing together the user and client needs, business goals, and technical realities in a cohesive form.
Beyond design, Kiera enjoy open-water swimming, sketching, trans-continental cycling, and making commercial art for the national Art-o-Mat project.
Nilkanth Patel
Data Visualization Designer
Quantcast
Nilkanth is a Senior Product Designer at Quantcast. His full name is hard to pronounce so he goes by “Neel.” He graduated from Columbia University with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, but quickly realized that was an awful decision. So naturally, he threw himself into the world of journalism. After a couple years at The New Yorker as an Associate Designer, he returned to his alma mater for an M.S. in Journalism, and then another in Computer Science. During that time, he interned at the Graphics Desk for The New York Times, and then worked there as a Freelance Graphics Editor.
Neel loves building things for the web—everything from sketching, to designing, to developing, and even deploying! He also loves basketball and misses the days when he could go to Knicks games for free by pretending to be a “member of the press.”
Jerome Cukier has been working in data visualization for over a decade in many roles. He currently works as an engineer, building internal tools for Uber’s Visualization team. Prior to Uber, Jerome was a product designer at Facebook and designed analytics tools for advertisers.
Mike Terry
Technical CoFounder & Engineer
Lawfty
Mike is the technical co-founder of Lawfty, a data-driven system that connects consumers searching for lawyers with injury attorneys in their local region. Prior to starting Lawfty in 2013, Mike started streaming video analytics company SeeTheScene.tv, and also worked for many years as a signal processing analyst and engineer for Space & Airborne Systems at Raytheon and SGI.
He has a BS and M.Eng from MIT, where he studied Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and played football (yes, MIT has a football team).
Jacob Pollard
Data Scientist
Lawfty
Jake is a data scientist at Lawfty where he spends his time identifying signals in a forest of noise. He studied analytics at the University of San Francisco's MSAN program and mathematics at UT Austin. When not reading math books and deep learning papers, he can be found riding a bike in Marin county.
THIS EVENT IS PRODUCED BY:
Cascade SF is a design and technology organization based in San Francisco, CA. We produce events and spotlight talent in the tech industry to improve cross-team collaboration, sharpen your tools, and improve skills.
Check us out at cascadesf.com.
SPONSORED & HOSTED BY:
QUANTCAST
Quantcast is on a mission to create a more personalized digital world. We utilize big data and machine learning to solve the biggest challenges in marketing and create more relevant digital experiences. Publishers use our insights to better understand audiences and how content resonates with consumers they want to engage. Marketers utilize our understanding of online behavior and our predictive advertising capabilities to find new customers. Consumers see the results of our work in relevant stories and advertisements that create a personalized experience across all of their devices. Designers and data geeks join the team at Quantcast for opportunities to make a big impact through interface design, data visualization and leading a cultural transformation to be more customer-centric. Oh, and we’re hiring (naturally J).
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?
E-mail Andi Galpern at andi@cascadesf.com with any questions you might have.
What is the refund policy?
All tickets are non-refundable and available on a first-come-first-served basis.
