Thesis Statement
I want to document how I spend my time and visually present my findings through information design. This will strengthen my awareness of the life choices I am currently concerned. Some of these concerns include time management, anxiety, and overall health. Through this process, I will develop a prototype for a mobile application that will allow users to explore similar data about their own lives; the application will allow users to see correlations between data collected from wearable physiological trackers and other life-tracking applications. This type of application is not currently available.
Background Information
The Quantified Self is a movement that involves personal data collection in terms of inputs, performance, and states. Although self-tracking has existed long before the movement was created, The Quantified Self term was proposed by Gary Wolf in 2007. Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, editors of Wired magazine, created the online community Quantified Self Labs. This website allows members to create international meetings and events, produce community forums, and share web content and services. It also features a comprehensive guide to self-tracking tools. Through this community, there are over a hundred groups in thirty four countries that participate in the Quantified Self movement. The primary use of self-tracking has been for the improvement of health and wellness. Other uses include productivity, education, personal behavioral analysis, and to increase overall self-awareness.
Intent and Audience
My primary intended audience is the general public who are interested in life-tracking. I want my audience to understand how personal data collection can be an effective tool for self improvement. Data analysis has become apart of our everyday lives. Many people are unaware of the benefits that life-tracking provides and can have on self improvement. With the use of smartphones and other mobile devices, life-tracking is easier than ever. If you are concerned about aspects of your life, this practice can give you insight that can only be discovered through the collection and analysis of personal data.
Research Process
I began my process by researching the Quantified Self movement and Lifelogging. During this process, I also researched information design. I became inspired by informational designers like Nicholas Felton and David McCandlesss. I have also been looking at Alan Dye, Mike Matas, and Ben Garrat for UX/UI research. During this research, I began to use different applications to record my data. As I used these programs, I learned which applications were most effective at helping me work toward my goals. I also studied different applications to test their usability. I ended up using three programs. Up by Jawbone is connected to the physiological tracker I wore that automatically tracked my heart rate and physical activity. I also used Up to collect data on how I slept and what I was eating. The second application is ATracker. This program allowed me to track and record my time usage and daily activity. The last application I used was the Reporter app that was co-created by Nicholas Felton. This program allowed me to customize personal, randomly prompted questions to gain insight on my emotional experiences and activities.
Selection from Nicholas Felton's 2013 Annual Report Source: http://feltron.com/FAR13.html
Informational Design by David McCandless, 2015.
Thesis mapping exercise
Screenshots from the applications I was using to collect my personal data. The first set is from Up by Jaw Bone, the second from ATracker, the third is from the Reporter app.
Example of how my data looked like when I download it into an Excel spreadsheet from my applications.
Design Process
After I researched and began to use these applications, I started the layout design of my application prototype. After testing the data, I began a six week in-depth study and documentation of my life. During this time, I developed the wireframe and the general layout for my application proposal. At the end of each week, I compiled and organized all my data to compare different findings. Through this process, I was able to design the information into useful graphics for users to gain easy understanding and insight from their own personal data. While I developed the prototype, I focused not only on how to display this complex data, but also on understanding user experience and interface for a personalizable application.
Logo sketches for Life Dig
Process sketches of application interface
Final prototype was presented by using Invision
Discussion & Conclusion
During the process of making this prototype, I learned as much about myself as I did about designing a mobile application. This experience has had a great impact on my life. If I were to continue researching this topic and life-style, I would like to test different types of applications to understand how different forms of data could be compared and displayed. As I developed this project, I tried to understand as much about data analysis and development as I could. If I were to continue this project, I would also like to have help from developers to understand more about the capabilities of these programs. I would also like to have user testing of the applications, and gather personal data from others to use in my development. If this application were to be created, I realize that it would take a team years to develop. I now understand that there is a significant amount of time and work that goes into making applications. Although this was only a prototype, I learned a lot from this experience as a designer and a life-tracker. This project has increased my interest in user interface design.
References
Articles:
Bottles, K. (2012). Will the quantified self movement take off in health care. Physician Exec, 38(5), 74-5.
Choe, E. K., Lee, N. B., Lee, B., Pratt, W., & Kientz, J. A. (2014, April). Understanding quantified-selfers' practices in collecting and exploring personal data. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1143-1152). ACM.
Felton, N. (2015). Tracing My Life. In New Challenges for Data Design (pp. 341-352). Springer London.
Litt, G. (2015). 2014: A year in review with iPhone pedometer data. Retrieved January 12, 2016, from http://geoffreylitt.com/2015/01/01/2014-a-year-in-review.html
Lagus, K. (n.d.). Looking at our data-perspectives from mindfulness apps and quantified self as a daily practice. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM).
Mutlu, M. E. (2015). Design and development of a digital life logging system for management of lifelong learning experiences. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 834-848.
Ruckenstein, M., & Pantzar, M. (2015). Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm. New Media & Society, 1461444815609081.
Shull, P. B., Jirattigalachote, W., Hunt, M. A., Cutkosky, M. R., & Delp, S. L. (2014). Quantified self and human movement: a review on the clinical impact of wearable sensing and feedback for gait analysis and intervention. Gait & posture, 40(1), 11-19.
Swan, Melanie. (n.d.). The Quantified Self: Fundamental Disruption in Big Data Science and Biological Discovery. Big Data, 85-99.
Swan, Melanie. "Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0." JSAN Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks (2012): 217-53. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.
Wilson, H. James (September 2012). "You, By the Numbers". Harvard Business Review.
Photography:
Felton, N. (n.d.). 2013 Annual Report [Digital image]. Retrieved April 27, 2016, from http://feltron.com/FAR13.html
McCandless, D. (n.d.). Out of Your Hands [Digital image]. Retrieved April 27, 2016, from http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/out-of-your-hands/
Websites:
http://quantifiedself.com/
www.informationisbeautiful.net
www.informationdesign.org/
Other:
Gary, Wolf. "QS & The Macroscope". March 2014.
Wolf, Gary. "The quantified self". TED (conference).
Gilmore, J. (2015). Everywear: The Quantified Self and Wearable Fitness Technologies.
Razzouk, N. (2015). Quantified Self| The Body.
The quantified self. (n.d.). Retrieved April 27, 2016, from http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self
Tufte, E. (1991). Envisioning information. Cheshire, Conn. Graphics press.
