Prompts:
- what are the reasons for showing your visualization the way you are planning?
- are you taking into consideration something you heard in the talk to propose how your data will be embedded? Explain.
- how do you think your visualization will be unique and will catch the attention of the audience? how they will get to know you a bit more through the physicalization?
Response:
I eventually narrowed down my hypothesis to my deep sleep hours every day (my sleep quality) is affected by my pressure level. To measure my deep sleep hours, I used my Apple watch to track every night. To measure my pressure level, I used 3 dimensions: (1) my screen time (except the time for entertainment); (2) the unchecked/checked thing ratio on my to-do list, taking the length of the list into account as well; (3) examine my diary and rate my pressure on a scale from 1 to 10. I would comprehensively calculate the 3 dimensions and get my pressure level curve.
For the 3D modeling, I now came up with 3 ideas that seem doable and related to my topic. (1)a dream catcher; (2) a mediation bowl; and (3)a necklace (I attached a few pictures below to showcase). Since I want to emphasize the essence of keeping one’s pressure at a reasonable level and a relaxed mood in an attempt to sleep better, the 3D objects that I came up with serve as something that represents a good night’s sleep or something that could soothe one’s mind.
The way I decided to embed the data takes the features of the intended objects I chose into account. For the dream catcher, I plan to use a circle of spheres, a sphere with a bigger radius representing a higher level of pressure. Since pressure to me is more like something squeezed in a bubble, I prefer to show it in the shape of spheres instead of lines. My deep sleep hours will be shown in a fan pattern, pointing to the spheres one by one to represent each day’s correlation.
I love the idea of artist and journalist Jaime Serra Palou using the coffee mug stain to customize his data collection. The one-time-use data visualization, as Professor Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami, explains, is to provoke curiosity, surprise, or simply a smile. Since the data for Project 1 is rather personal, brief, and probably inaccurate, I would also make it a more thought-provoking instead of informative one. When people see the visualization, and realize that it is a dream catcher that helps people sleep, I hope they may have a nice feeling. They will probably get empathic to my experience as well since college is no doubt a place filled with pressure and anxiety and everyone still hopes to get a peaceful mind and a good night’s sleep somehow.
