Mobiles have become part of our daily lives and besides communication, we have availabilty of a vast variety of apps that can make our daily life a lot easier. To make it this easier, mobiles keep a tab of multiude of data about ourselves. From, accounts to healthcare to photos, messages and much much more at a granualar level.
These data about us can tell us insights about how we function, how we are and more things about us that we might not realise unless shown to us.
This project brought out what does my phone gallery data says about me as a tangible output - a data physicalisation.
Data Collection & Cleaning
With the above questions in mind, I started collecting data and cleaning them to see if I can get insights from it.
613 photos that were clicked through my phone camera were collected. The photo collection was from time period of OCTOBER to NOVEMBER. The data about each photo was extracted like Date & Time of Photo, Day it was clicked. Manually the category was defined for each photo.
The category heirarchy and the excel sheet of data coloumns are shown below.
Insight Collection & Selection of Data for Physicalisation
Basic charts in excel were created to see what insights can be gathered keeping the initial brief in mind.
Category data gave insights of me as a person and what I like to click and store on my phone. It was the perfect amalgamation of Data and Humane Story. So went ahead with visualising the Category of Photos in my camera gallery.
Ideation
Different layouts and representative styles were tried out to see how the data can be well represented and clearly communicated.
Camera Lens
when the dials of the lens are aligned, we get the focus on the subject and we click the photo. Similarly when the dials are not properly aligned, we get a blurry photo of the subject. It is analogous to how we represent data. When the data is clearly represented i.e. Focused Data, the communication is perfect on the point without any misinterpretation whatsoever.
Physicalisation
The Tree Graph was taken as initial idea for the physicalisation.
The dials were created using MDF sheets and glued together for giving height. 3 different dials were made for 3 heirarchy - MONTH, CATEGORY, SUB-CATEGORY.
Final Outcome of Data Physicalisation - The Tangible Product
The data visualisation showed that I take photos of Individual People and Food more than rest of the categories.
"a good company with good food is something that Somesh is."
