Getting started

This week for our Data Visualization class we were asked to reflect and collect data on ourselves. Why? You ask. Well, for this first we have to understand what data is. Data is well, “anything that can be mapped, counted, or measured” according to Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. You see, Lupi and Posavec, are two award-winning designers, who one day decided to use analog means to capture all the data they could…about themselves. They were curious what they could learn about themselves. So, each agreed to observe, collect, and draw their experiences on a postcard. Each week, the completed postcard was mailed. Giorgia would send her postcard to Stephanie in London. Likewise, Stephanie would reciprocate and mail hers to Giorgia in NYC. They called their analog project Dear Data. Lupi shares that “we can use data to become more humane and to connect with ourselves and others at a deeper level.”

Observe

With this in mind, I first needed to determine what I wanted to collect data about in my life. This was a little hard because my initial thought holding me back was “who cares about your daily data points? No one really wants to know because you’re not an internet influencer, celebrity, or royalty.” Once I got past this, I thought about what has been happening with me over the past month. There was a lot and one thing I was curious about was how distracting is my phone? What is the most distracting phone app? Do I have an addiction? Using this as my basis for my ultimate reason for collecting and mapping out my data. I began with the following question: “What are the most common apps I use on my phone?”

Collect

Over the next week, I paid attention to my app usage and jotted it down in my Remarkable tablet. This typically went like this: open the app, write down the time I started the app, close the app, write down the time I closed the app. Okay, this really only occurred the first day because then I remembered to work smarter not harder. You see I have an iPhone and all these data points are collected in Settings>Screen Time. Therefore, for the rest of the week, I would review my screen time usage the next morning so that I was capturing the full day before.

At the end of the week, I analyzed the data I had collected. During the week I collected the data, I could see a trend start to emerge. When I was bored at work, I would tend to go on Instagram or answer a text message. The next step was to see if my assumptions about the data was true. It was time to visualize the data now!

Draw

After analyzing the data, my next step was to figure out how I wanted to represent the data. While apps have their own icon, I wanted to ensure it reflected what I saw in the data and to provide a legend. This process took me longer than expected. After contemplating it I came up with simple icons to represent the apps (based on their digital versions) and simple shapes to represent four distinct times of day. Below is the outcome of my data mentioned earlier and the legend/icons I described above.

Final Reflection

Reflecting on this project, I believe I did learn that I’m more distracted with my phone throughout the day. My initial thought is that I need more detailed data to make any behavioral changes. However, the data I did collect have helped me to become more self-aware of my phone-to-app behavior. Because of this, I will be more conscious when I go to use my phone and ask myself: “Do you really need to use that app?” “Will the world stop if you don’t use the app?” Ultimately, I believe this sort of data self-reflection exercise can be therapeutic in this age of everything digital.

Source

The project. Dear Data. (n.d.). https://www.dear-data.com/theproject