Ruined Cities of my Mind: A Personal Data Story

Ruins motif

As I’ve been learning about tracking personal data, one thing that designer Giorgia Lupi said stuck with me: Tracking personal data makes you more mindful.

Knowing that, I wanted to start tracking my conversations as well as the emotions and times associated with them. I decided to track four main data points:

1. Who I talked to.
2. When did the conversation end.
3. How did I feel after the conversation.
4. What social circle did the person belong to.

My sister is studying psychology, and she loves doing research. As I talked to her about this project, she warned me to be careful that I don’t assume causation from my data.

This is a point I hadn’t considered before. When I read a graph, I usually assume some relationship between two data points.

I realized that if I went on and constructed my visualizations as I planned, I would be implying false relationships between my emotions and the people I talk to.

There are a lot of variables that affect my emotions that I have not measured. I don’t have anything about my diet or sleep schedule or work life even though they could drastically change my emotions.

Knowing this, I set out to create my visualizations. I would need to make sure that emotions and interactions data are not divorced from the time element data. Social circle data could be less connected with time directly without implying much.

First Draft

For my first visualization I wanted to make something artistic. If I could group every interaction I had in my week by the social circle they belong to, I could create a winding road connecting them all that represents the timeline.

I designed small icons for each interaction to represent the emotion I felt after that interaction finished. They each are a single building in what would become my mini city:

The Key for my data visualization. Each building shape represents a different emotion.

This is the visualization for the first one and a half days of my week of data:

My first visualization: one and a half days of tracking my conversations by social circle.

At this point I realized that I would be quickly running out of time if I tried to log the entire week this way, since I would need to arrange the “roads” and “buildings” so they could still be legible.

So, I decided to narrow the scope of my visualization.

Instead of representing every interaction with a unique building, I would only log the conversations that ended with me feeling happy. It seemed like a concrete and attainable goal.

It was not.

Ruins Draft

I had so much data that even trying to use digital art was much too slow. I quickly ran out of time while organizing the data, only managing to set up the data map with four points:

The framework of an unfinished visualization.

Through this project I have learned that there is no use for data if it can’t be visualized in a quick and efficient manner to meet a client’s deadlines. If I want to attempt something as artsy in the future, I will need to organize my time so I can build the visualization by the due date.