Data Portrait: Stress Scritching

Description

The swirling background represents a 24hr day/night cycle condensed to 24 seconds and the calendar date changes in the background to signify the passing of days. The face in the center of the sketch has some of my general features, but nothing specifically identifying in order to let people imagine themselves as the subject of the piece in to reinforce the dehumanizing feeling of stressed-exhaustion. The face's beard is composed of 100 individual hairs that one by one turn gray based on the times I touched or scratched my beard during the course of the day. This creates a clear visual image of my stress levels during the course of day, illustrating not only my overall stress for each day, but what times I was more or less stressed.

Design Process

I began by gathering my data in a google spreadsheet, logging the time at which I noticed myself touching or scratching my beard. At first I thought about marking ANY time I touched my face, but the number of data points quickly began to grow out of control, so I decided to just stick with my beard. Over the first 3 days I recorded increasing numbers of beard touching, culminating in the third day in which I stayed up for a 24 hour period, versus the rest of the days in the data set where I got roughly 6-8 hours of sleep a day. The thrid day I recorded 95 instances of beard touching, but the following day after finally getting some sleep, the number fell to the mid to low teens for remaining 4 days of the observation period.

I decided pretty quickly to look at my beard scratching, which led to a clear visual for how I wanted my data portrait to look. Since I would be focusing on touching my beard, I wanted to represent my data with my beard as well. I also landed on connect the beard touching to stress levels early on in the process as well, but wasn't sure about the best way to convey that. I toyed with idea of hairs disapearing over time, but landed on the grey hairs since I still have my beard and have been seeing more and more of my actual hair turn grey. I also liked the idea of a perpetual day/night cycle in the background to drive home the seemlying unending nature of all of the work I felt so behind on.

Initial sketches

Visually I followed the ideas in my sketch pretty closely, but decided that a floating head and more abstract background was more impactful. After I had my visual look laid out, I worked on mapping out the cycles of growing grey hairs in relation to the day night cycle. As of writing this, I am still working on getting the hairs to appear sequentially as over the course of a day/night cycle, but I think the current visualization of beard that gets progressively greyer with each cycle before going back to being mostly brown still conveys the message.

Reflection

I decided to focus on this habit of mine because I am currently trying to break it and I believe that making myself more mindful of when I do it will allow me to check myself more often. I believe the beard touching was in a part a stress response, based on annecdotal evidence over time and the fact that the dropoff occured after pulling an all-nighter to finish try and finish two projects I had been stressing over for the past few days. I think it's important to keep in mind the numbers of the first three days are so high in part due to staying up later and getting less sleep compared to the last four days, thus creating more opportunity time and decreasing my awareness of scratching my beard. While the stresses of my environment and events in my life have not gone away, thankfully I am happy to report that this exercise resulted in the desired effect of reducing the amount of times I touch or scratch beard throughout the day!