Card Exercise for Data Modeling

Here are four images:

Image one Image two
Image three Image three

Task One

Use either pen and paper.

Write a short description of these four objects. Entirely free form. About 3 or four sentences only.

Task Two

  • Discuss your description (with partner)
  • Circle or mark nouns and adjectives.

Task Three

  • Form into larger groups ~(4-6 members)
  • Narrow down to three kinds of adjectives (make “color” one of them)

Task Four

Now you will work either on a whiteboard (plan to fit at least 6 on the board, maybe more), or on a large post-it pad (use multiple pages).

Go wild and generate as many ways of representing these data as you can; extra points (as it were) for sillier and more convoluted structures. You definitely don’t have to limit yourself to rectangular rows/columns. You don’t have to know how to untangle the data, but you do have to represent it all.

Here are some examples just to get you started

  1. Free-text sentences (as in your first task)
  2. A spreadsheet with a tab for each object
  3. A spreadsheet with a single tab and just rows and columns (where a column is titled “object_name”)
  4. A spreadsheet with multiple small tables scattered around it.
  5. Illustrations with labels
  6. …

Image Credits

Images obtained via Creative Commons search.