Project #9 Data Portrait | Daily Laughter

Description

Laughter, one of the most common actions in our whole life, starts from the giggles when we are infants. It reveals the vividness in our normal life—the happy time, the leisure time, the grateful time, the releasing time, etc. Some of them blend into our memories and whenever we recall, they bring us to the similar moment. Yet, the others fade away. Therefore, I decided to document such moments and hope to find some unexpected pattern.

This work demonstrates the seconds of me laughing in 7 days from November 23 to November 29. The cyan half of the canvas indicates the day from 6:00 to 18:00 and the dark blue half indicates the night. 7 days of data scatters on the 7 concentric circles sequentially, where seconds in the day being illustrated as sun and those at night being illustrated as moon. If a moment is laughing together with friends, a halo is behind the icon. What’s more, if the content of making me laughing is conducted offline, in other world, I laugh because of things surrounding me in reality rather than those on the internet, the icon is connected to the center of the circles.

Design Process

After deciding to to visualize my laughing moments, I stared my ‘documentary’ 7 days. At the beginning, I was not used to writing down the time, the content and the level of laughter when I laughed. It was after hours that I remembered the task and recorded the approximate time. Later, I gradually formed a habit of recording the moments. Most of the documentations are recorded in real time, except for the 6th day’s midnight when we had an all-night party, played games and laughter never stopped, I threw myself into the party and added the moments the next day, with randomized level of laughter in the step of 10 minutes in different game time intervals.

Below is the data sheet. To protect the privacy of my friends and me, the detailed content that made me laugh are not shown, instead, I categorize them into Online/Offline, Alone/Together.

Then, I started to design the visualization. First, I choose to use different circular orbit to demonstrate the data at day and night in 7 days. As laughter indicates the vividness in our normal life, the sun that brings warm in the day and the moon that light the roads at night are ideal illustrations. Since laughing together is more powerful and contagious than laughing alone, a halo could be introduced. Offline contents are often more connected, so, a line is used to connect the moment with the center or the orbit, while the online contents stay on the cloud and flow individually by the orbit. The draft of the canvas is shown below.
For the coding part, apart from deciding the parameter sizes of the orbit and the elements on the canvas, the biggest challenge is to determine the x, y coordinates of the illustration. Transformation of parameter equation on a circle is essential, which shows the relationship between rotating angles calculated from the time clockwise in different radius and the cartesian coordinates on the canvas.

Reflection

Through the process of self-tracking, the unexpected gain is that I have noticed those moments that I laughed unconsciously. Though recording was a little bit interrupted, it also reminded me of the unconscious second, for example, when I received several compliments on my works by my classmates, I laughed slightly, which brought me a sense of gratitude and achievement.

Meanwhile, from the visualization, I find my laughing pattern mainly focus at night, which aligns with my everyday schedule that serious works and classes are taken in the daylight, and after a day’s work, I tend to find some entertainment and recharge myself.

Code