For the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting data about myself for what I thought was going to be my quantified selfie. My plan was to see the correlations between how much work I have, the sleep I get, my mood, the weather, and how much junk food I eat. I always knew it was a shallow idea, but it was a starting point. Last week, after I was appalled at the large pile of clothes on my floor during my upkit2 work days, I started logging “how many things are on the floor” at around 9pm each day.

My project has now shifted to focus on this floorspace issue. However, I have very little data now that I’ve changed it. I also don’t know how to progress from here, or how to visualize it. Others (Wanfang and Harris) suggested that I take progressive photos of my floor to better capture times of day and how much is on the floor. The issues I have with this is privacy and feasibility of taking these pictures due to the arrangement of my room and the existence of my roommate. Also, after thinking about it, the stuff on my floor is generally consistent within a day; meaning that if there are 5 things on the floor at the start of my day, there will be about 5 things on my floor when I get home. This is generally due to the fact that the things don’t move on their own when I’m not around. In conclusion, it’s more of the day to day change that will be varying. My thoughts right now are to take a picture of my floor right before I go to bed. This will pretty much be the time in which I’ll have decided to either clean my room or not give a flying poop and leave it the way it is.

From these pictures, I’ll hope to generate a program to gather the percentage of floorspace left of my floor (in comparison to a picture of my floor when it’s clean, if that’s even possible). From this, as Kevyn suggested, I can visualize the floor junk in comparison to a stack of books representing how much work I have.

I think how much sleep I get, restlessness, etc. (things I gather from my FitBit and AskMeEvery questions) count a great deal into my messiness. It is not just a matter of what I have that day that makes my room messy, but what I could have the next day or have had the previous days. For example, I may not have a lot of work today, but if I just had a long streak of work and sleepless nights, then I’ll be too exhausted to care about my tidiness.

My current 2 ideas on possible visualizations are as follows:
1. A Predictor: I will analyze the data and synthesize some sort of correlation between work, sleep, and mess. Then I can create a software system (or physical, but less plausible) in which you can adjust amounts of work or sleep given to me and see how messy my room might be. I would then send this to my mother and tell her to get off my back about cleaning my room. Or to my roommate as a warning and apology for my side of the room having been struck by a tornado.
2. A physical somewhat abstract creation: I’m obsessed with somehow finding a project I can do that is physical. As much as I love communication design and lack the skills of an industrial person, I desperately love tangible objects and wish I could create something for it. I would probably create some sort of sphere or cylinder in which a person could turn it over in their hand and follow the work flow (possible color-mapped with light colors representing light work and darker colors representing heavy work load). Those portions of the object would be bumpy or somehow physically changed to represent the mess. I don’t want to create anything too abstract otherwise the data collection will have been useless, so we’ll see how far I can take this idea.

I have class right now, so those are all my thoughts for now. I’ll figure it out.