Mengzhen, Xiao
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
28 01 2018
Assignment 01: Quant Self Project Review, Introduction to Quantified Humanists & Self-tracking in week 1
As the start of my way of learning quantified humanists, I reviewed many existing quantified self projects.
In this blog, I highlight some of them and analyze their broader significance, and why they caught my interest.
Discription: Moodscope by Jon Cousins is a project turned into a social site where users can track their mood and share their status with friends. The founder, Jon Cousins used to suffer from depression from time to time. A psychiatrist suggested him to track his mood for three months so that the condition could be verified. Cousins couldn't find a ready way to do this, so he started using a psychological test that was a set of 20 cards with adjectives. He also tracked his scores on a graph, noting the ups and downs of his mood. It turned out that measuring and sharing have helped, sometimes remarkably. And he's moved the whole system online.
Source for graphic: Moodscope, moodscope.com.
Broader Significance: This project can help psychiatrists track their patient's condition. And also to people who suffer from depression, self-mood measuring and tracking have a significant impact on self-awareness and self-healing. By sharing data with people we trust, our behavior can change for the better while we believe we are being observed. Having social connections also lifts the mood.
Why it's interesting to me: Emotional adjustment has been what I'm interested in for a while.
This project provides a new perspective for me on personal adjustment emotional adjustment that can benefit a lot from quantified self.
I'm also inspired that if personal mood data can be mashed up with other data APIs such as weather, time, or personal schedule, it might be more helpful to analyse the reason for mood changing, especially why depression comes out.
Discription: This project provides a new approach for visualizing Quantified Self data that are collected and aggregated from a variety of social media services or wearable devices that a person might be using, and represented as a graphical avatar. The same type of activities are collected from each service within a certain category, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), work related (Google Drive, LinkedIn, Wordpress), music (Spotify), films (IMDB), photography (Instagram, Flickr), and fitness (Nike+, Fitbit).
Source for graphic: Composition of different images to create each avatar, Visualizing Quantified Self Data Using Avatars.
Broader Significance: This project investigates a new approach of visualizing in a meaningful and enjoyable way that gives the users insights into their personal data. Unlike many other data visualization diagrams, which seem like art rather than readable data sets, the overall design is monochrome. And the avatar is a simple outlined figure, which is very clear and easy to recognize. It's significant that massive data from several Apps can be analysed and transform into such a clear, simple and elegant avatar.
Why it's interesting to me: There's no doubt that this is a good example of visualizing Quantified Self data. Data visualizing of many quantified self Apps would rather make users confused than enable them to explore or even interact with them, contrary to the original intention of their function. This project gives me some inspiration of how to analyses personal activity data, decide what kind of data should be collected, and provide meaningful information to the users.
Discription: This project by Erika von Kelsch is to organize 100 pieces of data into a static print piece. Erika von Kelsch, who had considered being a professional musician at one point, choses 100 pieces of flute music that she have played that have been in her performance repertoire. The categories included: name of the piece, name of the composer, starting key signature, date of composition, her age when played, type of performance, length of the piece, time spent practicing, how enjoyable it was (1 to 10), and how memorable it was (1 to 10). She used what she learned from studying music to design and document her experience.
Source for graphic: 100 Pieces Of Flute Music, 100 Pieces Of Flute Music.
Broader Significance: This project is significant not only because it concludes 100 pieces of music information into one single data visualization diagram, but also because it works a vehicle to document Erika's experience of studying music, playing music and being influenced by music. To Erika herself, this project is the record of her music studying memory. To others, it makes us deeply feel her passion for music and be impressed by the stories it tells.
Why it's interesting to me: This project inspires me that quantified self can not only record and show people's mental or physical data but also is an impressive way to record and express experiences. As a designer, I always try to find a good way to record and organize my inspirations in everyday life, what I see, and what I feel, and I think quantified self might be a new way to do that.
Very interesting project suggestions, I like the variety and visual features of each. Have you read about github's identicons project? It's not quite as sophisticated as what you describe in example 2) but still an interesting way of developing an algorithmic iconography around someones' data. 💯