Data Crafting

Visualizing Data through Physicalization and its Impact on the User Experience

Click here for full project documentation.

Introduction

Clear, engaging, and accurate data visualization is so important in User Experience Design. We live in a world of infographics, “false” news, and byte-sized information. Data is no longer confined to the elite realms of science and policy, but is rather democratized and available in overwhelming amounts of “big data”. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that designers analyze and depict data in accessible, comprehensive, ethical, and interesting ways. The user must be able to understand and interact with the data in order for meaningful and comprehensive communication.

Through the “physicalization” of data, we can engage with data in a more intimate, impactful way. Data physicalization provides an accessible means of data analysis and interaction that simultaneously stimulates multiple senses. This provides not only a more layered and multifaceted analysis, but allows the viewer to physically interact with the data and draw meaning from the numbers in a way that a digital bar graph, line chart, or scatter plot could never provide.

This project is meant to pull data off of the computer screen and into the tangible world. As I stitched, crocheted, dyed, and sewed these pieces, new insights and depths of significance emerged from the numbers I was portraying. Through these pieces, I explored aspects of my personal life. The first project is a crocheted blanket that represents the number of hours per week I spend on a screen and in various digital realms. The second project explores my sleep cycles as they relate to the lunar calendar, as portrayed through bleach-dyed and embroidered patches that ultimately landed on an old, denim jacket. The third piece is a line graph depicting overall “happiness” levels between my partner and myself over the past 17 months, embroidered onto a COVID-19 face mask.

Physicalizing the data in this way turned the abstract into the tangible. The digital into the traditional. I used both contemporary and traditional material manipulation to lovingly and painstakingly depict these concepts, providing new affordances for the user and demonstrating an alternative method of data visualization.

Digital Engagement Quilt

This crocheted “quilt” depicts the number of hours I spend per week in digital spaces. Each square represents a different digital “space”: work/design, social media, Zoom, texting/chatting, email/Slack, and television. Each row represents one hour.

As a woman in STEM, as well as with the forced increase in digital interactions due to COVID-19, most of my life is spent staring at a screen. I have a love/hate relationship with technology. My passion is user experience design, and technology is both the present and the future. However, technology can also separate us and reduce empathic understanding, allows for widespread misinformation and data security issues, and removes us from the natural world. I wanted to take this relationship and visualize it through a craft I learned as a child: crocheting.

Crocheting is a part of my culture. Growing up in a Latinx household, my grandmother taught me how to crochet at the age of four, and my life has always been draped with the crocheted afghans of my mother, grandmother, and myself. Crocheting is a meditative activity for me, allowing for a flow state to emerge while my fingers move in their practiced patterns. Although this took hours and hours to produce, my mind was free to relax and wander, resulting in a deep relationship with the data.

Crochet is a slow, dedicated artform. Each stitch must be carefully tied and counted. I loved the concept of taking the digital and manifesting it in this way. This quilt is a sort of antidote to my current reality, in which most of my work, creativity, workout routines, and relationships take place on a screen. I am disappointed with the size of the squares representing television and social media, however by physicalizing those hours in this way, I was able to create something warm and comforting.

Melatonin and Moon Cycles

Like many people, I’ve been struggling to maintain a consistent sleep schedule throughout quarantine. COVID-19 has created a monotonous, yet constantly shifting new reality and time has lost its normality. Society feels simultaneously trapped in a real-life version of Groundhog’s Day as well as The Day After Tomorrow, and our ability to maintain happiness and hope is dependent upon our ability to adapt.

As we know, sleep is incredibly important to your overall wellbeing. Yet a healthy sleep schedule has been my largest struggle since the beginning of this pandemic — some nights I don’t sleep at all and others I sleep far too long. With this project, I wanted to record and analyze my sleep patterns as they relate to the lunar calendar.

Each circle represents a moon phase throughout a lunar cycle, and the white lines signify the number of hours I slept during those 24 hours. These hand-dyed and embroidered circles become abstract pie charts, mimicking a wall clock in their appearance. As you can see, I slept a lot on the New Moon, and very little on the Full Moon. The other lunar phases are varied, depicting just how sporadic my sleep schedule is.

This is a difficult challenge to overcome. Through taking this data and physicalizing it with some bleach-dyed cutouts from an old pair of black jeans, I was able to confront this reality and reflect upon it. My frustration faded away, and I was able to generate more compassion and self-love despite what I view as a personal short-fall.

Love and Embroidery in the Time of COVID-19

For this project, I charted the relative “happiness” levels between myself and my partner since we got engaged 17 months ago. This project was inspired by the stories of those couples who have split up during quarantine. The pandemic has compressed our lives to the square footage of our house. While I have never been closer with my partner, there have been unprecedented struggles and a huge need for empathic communication during this time.

I wanted to test the effects of COVID-19 on our relationship in the context of a greater timespan. The two embroidered lines represent our personal “happiness” ratings for each month, and the bedazzled rhinestones symbolize significant events in our lives (getting engaged, moving, beginning graduate school, the beginning of the pandemic, etc.) I chose to display this data on a face mask, the ultimate signifier of COVID-19.

Stitching these individual data points provided the time and tangibility to more deeply engage with the data and what it actually means in the context of our lives and our relationship. Although the pandemic has certainly had an impact on our overall happiness, other events and life changes had equal and sometimes greater effects. This physicalization was cathartic. The criss-crossing threads allowed me to see our lives through a clearer, contextualized lens and proved that life has peaks and valleys no matter the wider, global landscape.

Conclusion: Common Threads

While physicalization in these particular forms is not easily produced nor replicated, these pieces do exhibit the great potential of data physicalization. In thinking about data visualization, we often turn immediately to digital applications and interfaces. However, through creating tangible objects to represent data, we can further democratize data analysis and engage users in innovative and multi-sensory ways. This allows for greater accessibility and provides new affordances and insights for the user.

Technology is rapidly evolving to allow for faster and more accessible methods for the physical visualization of data, such as 3D printing, laser-cutting, projection mapping, software advances, etc. At the same time, the evolution of “big data” has expanded society’s ability to access and analyze data. No longer is data analysis confined to the government or lab, but rather democratized and readily available for the masses.

This provides exciting possibilities as well as frightening potential for widespread manipulation and misinformation. Designers have an ethical responsibility to display data in understandable, impactful, and comprehensive ways for user engagement. Physicalizing data forces both the designer and user to slow down and interact with the data in an intimate, multidimensional way. By pulling data visualization off of the screen and into the real world, we can create tangible and meaningful explorations and interactions with data.