Academic Project | Data Self-Portrait
Project Brief
Class: Interaction Design: Storytelling
Role: Individual Assignment
Assignment: Create a visualization that presents insights from a dataset about yourself.
Strategy
For this project, I decided to compare different areas of productivity in my life. I started by brainstorming, looking around my apartment for quantities and repetitive habits.
I decided on one variable, my Instagram account where I could categorize the posts into different interests. So, I counted each and every post by hand that I had, and organized them by dates.
Purchase History
After my data was collected from Instagram, the dates ranged from the years 2017-2021. I now needed to find more information where data had been recorded during that same time period. So I counted my Amazon purchases, that I had made during those years.
I wanted one more element to compare. I had thought about my semester history during that same timeframe, and how many courses I had taken.
I had now collected enough data to compare; it was time to synthesize and determine how I was going to translate everything into a visual representation that tells a story.
Design
I started with the Instagram data and chose to create a heat map. I thought it would display my various artistic passions, colorfully.
Instagram Posts Key Chart
To make sense of the heat map data, it was categorized by color in a chart next to the heatmap.
Corresponding Years
Each cell on the grid, was rendered to match the corresponding year. Here is an up close of one of the grids, that were created in Adobe Illustrator.
Amazon Orders
The order history was set up to read as the total quantity of orders per year (y axis) to the year purchased (x axis).
SMC Courses
I decided to to create a pie chart for displaying the data I had collected from the years I had taken courses at Santa Monica College. The total number of courses per calendar year, were categorized by color.
Final Design, Comparisons, and Insights
The final image tells the story of productivity in certain areas of my life. After analyzing the data created and collected, the data revealed that I had posted the most on Instagram during 2018, had the highest amount of Amazon purchases in 2021, and the year that I took the most courses in school, was in 2020.
I also noticed that the Instagram posts were at the lowest during 2020 and 2021, but those were also the years that I had taken the most courses. This lead to some further investigation.
Even though my educational needs took the lead compared to the other datasets, Amazon orders were still the highest during those years as well. With the two sets of data equally high, perhaps those orders were relative to the textbooks and other school supplies.
In conclusion, these patterns surfaced that there was a possibility of a relationship between school and and the Amazon purchases, during the same years. I spent less time creating artwork as I dedicated my energy into my education.
Takeaways
I had learned how to create a system by collecting new data and combining pre-existing data, implementing visual context into a heat map, graph, and pie chart. By comparing the initial three unrelated datasets, there were insights formulated and opportunities for possible connections found during this assignment.
In the future, the next data collection could focus on the two years of lowest instagram posts, or the two years of most courses taken, and/or categorizing the Amazon purchases to see if there is any correlation between textbooks and/or school supplies. There are multiple areas to further investigate the findings from the first round of data and insights.