Data Portrait
Description
For this project we needed to create a data portrait out of a personal habit.
Design Process
My Data Portrait counts how many times a day I yawn as well as the time of day I yawn. The top line of dots represents Wednesday, November 20 and the last line Wednesday, November 27. I wanted to design to sort of represent sleepiness and decided to go with a sort of hypnotic light effect that alters colors with different shades of blue. I had a hard time coming up with a dynamic way to use the setTimeout as required by the assignment. I'd be curious to know how people use it in general. I could definitely see how it would be beneficial in my game but when it comes to visualizing data, I couldn't quite figure out how to utilize it more effectively. After two seconds, you'll find at the bottom it shows my yawn count for the week.
Reflection
It was interesting keeping track of something so specifically, especially since time and space seem like such a nebulous thing right now. I do not doubt that I forgot to mark down a yawn or two over the week, but I can definitely see a pattern of when I do yawn so that was interesting. Tuesday is my least favorite day of the week, and the data represented that as I yawned the most on Tuesday. As far as the downsides, data of this nature is generally fairly harmless but I think, in a lot of cases, it can strip people of thier humanness when applied to things like crime, socioeconomics, etc.