Aligning the data and the visual

A student of a former professor of mine created a nice data visualization project (link). The raw data look like this:These are seating preferences of MIT students in a particular class. The dataset is actually larger than these 15 students; I clipped the rest.The classroom is a rectangle, and seat locations are fixed and clearly defined. I'm a bit surprised at the number of different locations for each student. I'd have expected that most students stick to a specific seat. The tint of the color seems to be the frequency of occupancy so the cell with the darkest color is the "mode" of the distribution.Arthur, for example, was always found in the back row, on the left side of the room while Fai and Kazuki preferred the right side in the front rows.The designer adopts a succinct style. There are no legends or text describing how to interpret the visual but I think the readers can competently perceive what the tints mean.The individual details are nice, but a story they don't make. The…

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