Project #6 IN THE MUNDANE

Description

For this assignment, I experimented with ways to visualize some mundane data that I collected throughout 9 days, from 10/04/21 to 10/12/21. All the data are represented in my sketch as some visual elements. Pressing you mouse will show the date on top of individual faces.

Instructions

To read this data portrait, you have to first know that there are three types of data that I used. The first is the mood which you can spot from the color of the faces, ranging from red (Stressed) to yellow (joyful.) The second is the length of the mustache on each face. The third is my uptime on each day which is reflected on the sizes of the dark circles on my eyes. Big dark circles mean that I didn’t have much sleep on that specific date.

Design Process

I started my design process with a brainstorm of the ways to visualize data. I found out that some of data can be naturally reflect on my appearances. Therefore, I went for that route. In general, I want to have a whimsical mood for my data portrait while keeping its basic informative function. As a result, I kept the design very clean and intuitive in terms of its ability of delivering my data.

Reflection

This assignment gave me a lot of creative space to work with and I really like it. Throughout my tracking, I realized how inconsistent my sleep schedule was. And my moods were also very much linked with the amount of work I had on that day. I know I like staurday the most and also found myself having enough sleep and feeling happy on last Saturday. In terms of the loss during the process of data visualization, I think it is hard to translate the accuracy of numbers into graphical shapes. The loss in accuracy feels almost unavoidable unless the designer chooses to incorporate actual numbers as visual elements into the data portrait.