Yelena Ye

⚜️ Designings⚜️

This documentation is about project 1 Visualizing Myself. I made a phone stand for this project because this project is related to phone, especially social media usage and my perception about myself. 

Based on the observations I made, my initial idea was to make something related to the phone, and shows the idea of connection and restriction at the same time. But eventually I only kept the restriction part and didn’t include the connection part. That could be something for future improvement because my classmate suggested that making another hand, wrapping it with other things and connecting the two can show the idea of connection.

… Anyways, here are my inspirations: 

⛓️ Modelings ⛓️

I made 3 iterations in total. And below shows my explorations & Final results 🙂

• Iteration #1 is very much like my previous blog post of this project. The hand came after my exploration of the chain, because if each link of the chain is not set in one shape, there is no way for it to hold the phones. 
• There are a few ways to fix the structure in pic 2. One is to make the holes bigger using the drill. The other is to heat and reshape the connecting parts. The latter one is harder to control, so the former one is recommended. 

💭Future Improvements 💭

• (some of the improvements can be found in the designing stage)
• After seeing the other projects from my classmates, I am thinking about adding more data into the project, like screen time or something to measure my actual productivity.
• The distance between the thumb and the index finger is a bit hard to measure, but it controls the angle of the phone. To make the model better I should take that into consideration. 
• There is also much to explore regarding the printing of the chain. The angle of each one can affect the printing result of the chain. 

In class exercise & Video Tutorials

• (don’t have much thoughts on this week’s exercises, we mainly practiced with the ones starting with “pt“, like ptPanel3D.   

• • • Planar Surf
    • 

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Project 1

This is the development of my ideas for project 1. If nothing goes wrong, it will be a phone stand 🙂

• About the data: 
  • I collected my screen time, time using social media (especially WeChat and Red), and my rating for my feelings that day (how do I feel about my productivity/ howdo I feel about my body/ how is my overall mental-wellness) as my data. The rating is based on the scale of 1~5, 3 means neutral, 1 means very bad, and 5 means very well. 
  •  As for how I plan to embed these data, the positive feelings (which come from being connected to other people, especially those who I can’t see very often in person), will be shown in the link part 🔗 (based on the numbers, the 🔗 will change in size); (I referred to this video for help)
  • the other part of it will be a measuring tape that signifies the societal perception/ standard of beauty projected and circulated through social media. (for this part I will use the twist command)
  • I want to use the shape of water splash to present my screen time. It can be the part that hold the phone stand. Here I want to take the idea from the talk by Alberto Cairo, about highlighting data. For those days that I felt especially bad or well, I want to highlight them by making the size larger. Maybe I will also use the variation of color 

• • Reasons for visualization (like that): 
    • It can be drawn from my hand-drawings that my idea developed from the phone case to headphones to phone stand. The reason why I gave up the phone case is because I don’t think it will come out as something practical (at least I don’t want to hold that weird shape in my hands, although I know data visualization doesn’t necessarily have to make some practical thingies). Headphone is the second because it is something related to the phone. But if I want to integrate my screen time data, the shape of it will be strange again, and it won’t be comfortable to wear. So eventually I turned to the phone stand. 
    • I once wrote this to describe my interactions with the phone and social media (it also explains why I collected these data): “On one side it is the link. It brings people together, forms soul to soul connection. On the other side it is the chain. It is the shackles that shape how we perceive ourselves and the world.” 
    • As for the water splash idea, I want to show that the phone/ social media has such great power that it is striving to suck people in (but I don’t know how to find reference picture online ;; so i just put it this way)

🪥Toothbrush

• It was a bit of struggling to model the toothbrush even after watching the tutorial.  The interfaces are every different because of different versions. Thanks a lot to Command that makes the searching process much easier. And I am getting more and more used to check the left bottom corner for error detection 🙂 

• I had 3 drafts actually, because I was doing the modeling work while watching the tutorial. It wasn’t a good idea.;; A few problems I met during modeling (and got it solved myself:
  • Control points can be added to the curves by doing the “Edit — Rebuild — point count“
• 

• I also had a lot of trouble editing the surface. One trick I learned during office hour is that I can create a line, and extend the separate curves that are supposed to be together to that line. In this way, I can make sure the two curves can be joined into one. For the control points that pop up from no where during the office hour, I realize I can just delete them 🙂
• I also encountered some problems with the cylinder, because I couldn’t find any metric to figure out the height of the cylinder. but the copying/ paste/ array I learned in this process was really helpful!! And I learned that more functions can be found in the “transform”

• This is what the toothbrush looks like in the end (tho I am pretty sure it looks nothing like a toothbrush 🙂

🎧  Podcast: Feminist Data Visualization with Catherine D’Ignazio | link

Data visualization is a way of communication and can be used to answer questions. It is, as Catherine D’Ignazio put it, “the view from above”, meaning that it is the view from a different body perspective. People try to use data visualization to present an objective truth away from human judgment, but in fact, the truth presented is partial, the data selection process might include problems like accessibility, truthfulness of the data. That’s why bias is unavoidable. To prevent bias, looking at the group of people datasets cover is very important. D’Ignazio points out that there are so many underrepresented people. However, I think it in a sense shows the great potential of data visualization. ⛓️

As a rhetorical act, data visualization for me encompasses both the aesthetic value and practical value. However, if a project is deemed as useful, it may focus more on presenting the data, and there might not be much space to have different personal interpretations of the project. On the other hand, a project which is more “beautiful”, or has more aesthetic values, people may have a more diverse interpretation of the project. The potential drawback of such project comes to my mind is that some audience may not understand the ideas behind the project, thus the communication of the thought might be affected. But overall, wither being more aesthetic of more useful, data visualization facilitates the interaction between data and human being. ✨

In this podcast, what I find most interesting is the definition of feminism. Catherine D’Ignazio mentioned that feminism is more than gender. It could also be race, ableism, power dynamics and so on. I think this definition reminds me to be more open-minded when paying attention to the data in our daily life. The significance of using a feminist perspective to visualization can go beyond my current understanding. 🫡

🦏 3D exercise with Rhino 🍿

• I have no previous experience in 3D modeling before, but I once tried to use p5.js to make a 3D project. I think this software is very convenient to use. Once you get familiarized with the functions, just searching everything in the search box can help you achieve what you want very easily. Using p5.js to generate 3D, if I remember correctly, requires some actions on constructing the canvas. It is much more complicated, but since p5.js is specially designed for 3D projects, it makes sense. (･_･; 

• I would like to learn how to do 3D modeling and data processing. Actually first class already changed my perspective on statistics and data, because I used to think these things are very cold and boring. However, after seeing the art pieces in class, I can feel that physicalized data does create visual impact and sometimes make people reflect on certain social issues. I myself am not very sensitive about data, but I hope through this class I can have more consciousness about data and social issues.

📖 Reading Reflections [link] 🤔

• We visualize data because data itself has no meaning. However, we are immersed in a world full of these scattered numbers tracked, measured, generated by technologies. To help us better perceive the data and understand its meanings, we use methods like data visualization and/ or data physicalization. It helps with data processing, and sometimes shows the processors’ interpretation on the data. The role that art play

  

  s in this process include but not limited to, 1) highlight the important statistics and making the presentation more aesthetic; 2)  enhance visual impact; 3) make the data interactive. On the other hand, the theme of an art project can be a set of data, but it can also be real life story, natural scenery, myths and imagination. Data visualization/ physicalization is a form of art. 

• One idea that strikes me is that material matters too. Different materials have different implications and meanings, thus can add on to the impact of the physicalized data. This certainly can not be achieved by traditional digital visualizations. Nowadays man-made, synthetic materials are also very popular. I think these materials can create the same or similar texture as the natural materials. (But I am not so sure if the impact they make are the same. In my opinion, if we just appreciate the art garments from distance, it might be the same. However, feeling and touching them might not because man-made materials are usually lighter.