A recreation of the seating habits visualization from 2011, which shows where my classmates attending MIT’s 15.514 course liked to sit. Names are anonymized. Thanks to my friend and former classmate Ali Kamil for inspiring me to recreate it.
Adonis, Chan, Fai and Kazuki each spent more than half their classes in one seat. All four of those seats are in the first two rows, on the right side of the room.
Six in ten sittings were in the left half of the room. Two front-row seats on the right, 9 and 10, were never used at all, even though they sit between Fai’s and Adonis’s favorite seats.
Only about one time in five did someone sit in the same seat as the last class they were recorded in: 84 times out of 430. Each square is one time a student came back to class and sat in the same seat as last time.
This was the first data visualization I ever created, before I knew it was a career one could go into. I credit Prof. Alan MacCormack (now at HBS) for introducing me to the field by taking me on as a research associate during my first semester at MIT. Thanks to my friend and former classmate Ali Kamil for inspiring me to recreate it this weekend. :)