  The amount of visual communication we are facing is rapidly increasing, and
skills to process, understand, and generate visual representations are in high
demand. Especially students focusing on computer graphics and visualization can
benefit from a more diverse education on visual literacy, as they often have to
work on graphical representations for broad masses after their graduation. Our
proposed teaching approach incorporates basic design thinking principles into
traditional visualization and graphics education. Our course was inspired by
the book Dear Data that was the subject of a lively discussion at the closing
capstone of IEEE VIS 2017. The paper outlines our 12-week teaching experiment
and summarizes the results extracted from accompanying questionnaires and
interviews. In particular, we provide insights into the creation process and
pain points of visualization novices, discuss the observed interplay between
visualization tasks and design thinking, and finally draw design implications
for visual literacy education in general.
