Teaching information aesthetics as a research class in China

This article reports on our experiences while attempting to scale up the research training in a typical Chinese class. Kang Zhang and Quang Vinh Nguyen jointly ran a research class in the School of Computer Software at Tianjin University, China, in the spring semester of 2013, with 41 undergraduate and master’s students. The course research topic, information aesthetics, covered information visualization and generative art. Seven teams were set up to conduct seven different projects within the topic, and several were able to produce research papers published or accepted by journals and conferences (four publications out of the seven team projects). As part of this process, we developed an innovative method for setting up project teams based on the strengths of individual team members.