Garden of Self-Love
Garden of Self-Love
Assignment
For my Interactive Visualization class, I was given the opportunity to take a week of my life and collect data on it to later formulate into a design and story as one of our first projects. We were free to choose whatever aspect of our life we wanted to track, something deep or more lighthearted, the choice was ours.
Meaning Behind the Data Choice
For me, like most people, the new year is a time of reflection, change, and growth. 2023 had a lot of amazing highlights, but in general, I look back on it and see mistakes and interpersonal turmoil that left me feeling less than my best. I am thankful for the lessons and want to make sure 2024 is not a part two, but instead a year of ‘me’.
There are a lot of things I am ‘taking with me’ into 2024 all on the theme of bettering myself inside and out. This includes eating healthy, sticking to my skincare routine, diving more into my religion, NOT dating, and being consistent with my workout routine.
When I received this assignment, I took it as an opportunity to both keep myself accountable to one of my goals, and also make a beautiful visualization of the growth and change that’ll come with sticking to my resolutions and putting time, energy, and sweat into me.
I chose to zero in on my gym and workout routine data because moving my body does wonders for my mental health, self-worth, and productivity in other aspects of my life. It’s a keystone habit that helps the rest of my life flow better. Outside of any scale results that may come from it, building my body and getting stronger mentally is very gratifying, seeing the progress week to week is encouraging for the soul.
Collecting the Data
For seven days, a week out of my life, I tracked my exercise. As of right now, I live on campus at my university and quite literally am a five-minute walk to my school’s gym, so there aren’t many excuses I can come up with for why I shouldn’t be in there often.
Going into the new year with this goal I wanted to make sure to give myself grace. I am my worst critic, but also typically respond a lot better to positive reinforcement than negative. Something is better than nothing. To make sure I don’t just give up on this goal I have given myself one rest day a week, Tuesday, because of my work schedule. If I took another day off because of life that was okay too. As long as the majority of the week I am intentionally moving my body, I am happy.
Every time I went to the gym I made sure to note down each day during the workout when I started and stopped various portions of my routine in my phone notes app. I decided to track a number of data sets in relation to my activity in the gym: what I was doing, who I was with, the environment I was in, alongside the time for each variable.
Visualization and Final Takeaways
Once I got all the data and reviewed it to prepare for making my visualization, I felt proud of my consistency and effort. A lot of the days I was going in very early to the gym, waking up to work out before I had class or work. I also stayed for a long time, on three days I was there over an hour, and I averaged 54 minutes of activity a day.
Working out in the gym can be a little anxiety-inducing, especially when you haven’t done it in a while or are new to it, so I was also glad to see the time I spent alone working out. Collecting the data really drove up my intrinsic motivation, alongside the natural endorphin boost I got.
When deciding how to visualize this data I knew, because of all the good feels I had, I wanted it to be colorful and creative. In an abstract way, I wanted the main takeaway to be the growth my body and mind were going through. I decided to draw out a plant, me! With colorful leaves growing out of it, all the time I put into me! The more leaves mean more growth.
The color of the leaves symbolizes whether I was doing cardio or strength training (pilates days are both) with each leaf being ten minutes. I added a curl in the leaf if I was with a friend, leaving it straight if I was alone. For extra color and data, I put gold flecks on the end of the leaf if the workout was in a gym class, and little blue dots if it was completed inside the gym in general. I take advantage of the free gym classes available to me, so you see the gold flecks a lot!
In the end, I have my little garden of self-love.
motivation and momentum I gained through this project is something I am going to take with me for the rest of 2024 and make this the best year it can be.
