As you can see (hopefully), I constrasted how much sleep I got, the quality of my sleep (how I felt on a scale from 1 to 10 each morning), and the visual of my natural face each morning.
I was pleasently suprised by the results. It seems that I felt better the more sleep I got (given that these are very rounded answers), and that, at least from my perspective, I generally look slightly more awake in the pictures with more sleep/better feeling. But that’s really subjective and it’s hard to be consistent every morning with making sure my face is in a natural, resting position.
This project was hard. At the very start when I heard that we were doing visual data I immediatly thought of comparing how awake I looked when I woke up (through pictures) versus how much I slept (recorded on the app Sleepcyle). I did not put any thought into how I was actually going to present this data. My main query was wondering if you can tell a difference in how alert you look given more or less sleep. When I brought this idea up in class David suggested I keep track of some other data point, so I decided to also record how I felt each morning on a scale from 1 to 10.
In the last couple days I have spent too much time trying to figure out how to show these three data points (one being pictures) on one visual chart/image. I first leaned towards some sort of graph with data points, because I didn’t want to deal with the pictures. So I created an area graph of how much time I spent in bed versus how much time I actually slept (all over how much sleep I got). I thought it looked super boring however, and I still wanted to find a way to include the pictures. Then I moved to a scrolling system where the further down you scrolled on the pictures the more sleep I got. And finally after I got frustrated with the plainness of that idea I settled on putting the pictures themselves on a horizontal timeline.
Even at this point I hadn’t figured out how to incorporate my third variable: subjective quality of sleep (or rather how I felt waking up). I came upon the solution quite by accident. I was dragging my photos into a photoshop file and resizing them so they could all fit on the page when I thought: “wait what if photo size indicated quality of sleep”. From this point on my frustration from this project looked like this:
… and thus I came to what I have in that final image/graph/picture collage.
If I were to do this again I would have figured out how I was going to present the data from the start, because I did not choose very presentable data points (or rather… pictures). This didn’t really change the way I looked at my life, but rather affirmed something I could’ve guessed: I look and feel more alert when I get more sleep. But then again, another person could look at those pictures and drawn the same conclusion. It’s hard to differentiate between “very tired” and “tired” in pictures. I also would have recorded more specific sleep length data.
Alright I don’t really know how to end this. I’m tired and I’ve already spent way too long on this project. Please excuse the casual tone of voice throughout this rambling post. Peace out.
Isaac Gazmararian 