In cooperation with my colleague Erik Hekman (Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht) we designed a new series of masterclasses on the fundamentals of data-driven design that aims at professionals, researchers, and lecturers in the media, communication, and creative business areas. The sessions are scheduled for April 2020 and will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
The course prepares you for the unique position as an intermediary between academic knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge. You will build up solid expertise for designing user-centered, data-driven solutions as a facilitator between the digital and human domains. Moreover, it teaches you to be aware of the circumstances in which you need to perform your job.
The main perspective in this series of masterclasses is to link academic thinking to practical performance. Aside from critically discussing the fundamental transformations that shape the digital society, as well as its implications for social and economic interaction, you will learn the practical fundamentals of data science. This includes programming skills in Python to load, save, collect, scrape, process, clean, transform, analyze and visualize data. At the end of the course, you will know how to critically examine the opportunities and the limitations of data, code and basic algorithms from a critical, user-focused perspective.
Every masterclass consists of two parts:
- Theory where you learn and critically discuss transformations in digital society. This part will be conducted in English.
- Practical skills where you collect, store, clean, transform data from social media and other internet sources with Python programming (including locating sources of open data), and you know how to extend your skills set by independently learning how to gather data from sources or in ways that were not covered during the masterclasses. The projects can be developed in English or Dutch (or German).
Find more information here on the Masterclass Introduction to Data-Driven Design.
Dennis Nguyen 