Visualizing Patterns

Shruti Aditya Chowdhury
CD Studio Documentation
6 min readDec 5, 2015

This project is about crafting visual, aural and temporal representations of data that communicate information, especially the emerging patterns.

I was interested in trying to figure out my changing diet. Whenever I move to a new place, my diet changes drastically. I love good food but it’s not always top priority. I think I ususally eat healthy but I can be a glutton. The relationship between my work hours and the amount (and type) of food I eat is strange and I haven’t really been able to pinpoint a pattern.

I was also interested in the idea of my eating habits changing if I knew I was capturing as data — like people being more active when they wear activity tracking devices.

First I started taking photos of my meals. I had the time and locations.

I then started weighing them

Yes, I even weighed my lunch.

It was impossible to do this on a regular basis so I just maintained an excel sheet. Plus I eat a lot more than I plan to in the morning.

So I started an excel spreadsheet.

I’m obviously no good at excel

The excel spreadsheet had to be reorganized

I learned conditional formatting!

This were the initial sketches exploring form using visual variables.

I saw this at Phipps and realized that on it’s own, the data doesn’t say much. The composition of meals and the time are pretty important for a healthy diet. But what is the benchmark? What is a healthy diet? What kinds of ‘diets’ do people follow? Contrasting these to my actual meals would be interesting and would accentuate the problems with my diet.

Exploring forms using visual variables. I looked at forms other than pie charts — and ways of representing time. I also considered interactions that viewers could have with the data and the layers of information that they could possibly see.

Using color, proportion and texture — using the rectangular grid of a calender
Using color, position and proportion in circular forms in a rectangular grid
A more literal ‘block by block’ representation of food and a digital sketch

To explore the form in digitally, I started defining the visual variables as graphics.

Converting the ‘Ideal’ meal to a simple iconic representation
Exploring color palettes
How do you represent the passing of time?

I looked at how shadows could possibly be used to show that the day was progressing and that meals were transitioning from breakfast to lunch to dinner.

At this point, though the visual components could represent the data, I didn’t think it looked enough like food.

More food-like
Small scale prototype for a diet-animation

I was pretty sure I wanted to show the temporal aspect and the ‘missed’ meal times using actual time so I constructed an elaborate time conversion system that would scale every 2 hours to 4 seconds.

The first row represents the ideal meals and the second row, the actual for each day (every column is a day). Though this does provide a contrast between the ideal and the actual, it was very confusing. Also, the video format allows for less interactivity.

I was trying really hard to move away from the literal representation of food (like color and photograph of the actual meal) to a more abstract representation. But the flat, clinical pie charts felt too far along the spectrum towards abstraction.

The intention of using the photographs was to create a texture and visual interest in the forms of the icons. In doing so, I still had to co-relate it to the colors of the ‘Ideal’ meal. I thought the outline would help but it wasn’t visible enough. Adding an overlay of color just muddled the message and the color.

A little less food-like

Changing the images to make them more like textures did help. Using grayscale images also did reduce the visual strain but it didn’t look exciting enough.

The added layer of information in the number of rings is the number of people I ate the meal with.

A little bit more food-like

I cropped several different images to see which would work best as textures and colors without additional graphic elements to communicate food groups.

A description of my project — the process and structure

An interactive Axure prototype of the visualization. You can view it on your browser using this link.
http://auzdg2.axshare.com/#p=home

Here is a walkthrough of the interactions

Food diary is an interactive log of everything I ate from Oct 19 to Nov 8, 2015. It’s a visualization of my eating habits with a focus on time and proportion of food groups consumed at each instance rather than amount. More information is revealed at each interaction that adds and changes meaning. Grain and vegetable is healthy right? Nope, it’s pizza. I wanted to see if and how recording and visualizing data about myself would force me to consciously make healthier decisions.

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