Great article and applicable to way more than just infovis. > In denying the student the ability to frame their main task as exploration, they are forced to co

Great article and applicable to way more than just infovis. > In denying the student the ability to frame their main task as exploration, they are forced to concede that what they want to find is not what their end-user may be looking for and then: (a) engage with their client or “create” a reasonable one with real tasks and decisions, (b) understand the data and tasks much more deeply, and (c) identify good validation strategies (no more insights!). > Maybe this is obvious, but when I started teaching I thought that being more open-ended about what I allowed was better. That somehow it would lead to more diverse, cool, weird, and novel projects. In some ways that’s true, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, teaching infovis is itself a wicked design problem. Its not just infovis, I think this is a good teaching idea in a very broad sense. Reading other people's writing nowadays, people are apt to be very lazy with their language and this by consequence makes them lazy with their ideas. Infovis should ban "exploration." Architecture should ban "modern." Career centers doing resume reviews should definitely ban "utilize." I'm sure every field has such tropes that are maybe useful in the real world sometimes, but make for quite lazy school projects. In fact I think he may be going a little overkill in justifying his ban on "exploration". He doesn't need to talk about weighing the pro/con here, if before he had a paucity and now he has a multiplicity of interesting student results, he's won and they've won. "Surprise" be damned. The kids can buy lotto tickets if they want to be surprised by big data. For being so simple, restricting the common and obvious in classrooms is probably an underrated technique. This is widely done in photography classes, disallowing students from doing certain things, like making them only use film for a while, so they really have to frame photos and can't just snap 1000 and "discover" one good one, or restrict to annoyingly wide prime lenses on an assignment to take some good portraits, etc. These constraints, even though they are constraints, greatly reduce the samey-ness of results and make the students engage their brains.