A Little About Me

I’m currently a second year masters student in the Interaction Design program.  Prior to CMU, I majored in art practice at UC Berkeley, where I also dabbled in computer science courses.  Since my focus leaned more towards painting and digital animation, I’m fairly new to the realm of Interactive Art, but I’m looking forward to merging many of my interests and experiences in art and design this coming semester.

Website: www.katytsai.com
Twitter: @katytsai
GitHub: www.github.com/katytsai

My Project: Calibrate

Since many of the projects I’ve worked on involving software are not really art or design related,  the project I’ve decided to share is a data visualization project created in Flash.  I created a simple web/mobile application titled “Calibrate” that helps you keep track of how you spend your time each day and visualizes your productivity over time.

To play with the interactive demo, you can go to the project page on my website  (http://www.katytsai.com/calibrate.html).  Here’s an image of what a visualization might look like:

And here’s a video that briefly explains the concept:

In general, I thought the project was successful because it allowed people to visualize and understand how they spend and manage their time in a dynamic and interactive way.  By providing feedback in different methods, people could find new trends and adjust behavior accordingly.  However, I would have liked to make the information even more dynamic, allowing people to filter information with more specifications and even help them discover trends that they wouldn’t otherwise have seen for themselves.  If I had more time, I would also try to play with more variations of displaying the information to make it a more rich experience overall.