OVERVIEW
This year, my new year resolution was to repair my messed up Circadian cycles. 1st January was a great achievement. And by the morning of 2nd January, after New Years’ Eve, I decided to reboot this year from the next Monday. And now, I am still lingering on to adopt the “sleep-and-wake-early” habit. We may believe that making everyday decisions results from our choices and sheer willpower. But, it is essentially the reflection of our unconscious habits. In fact, according to a study - “approximately 45% of everything we do daily is driven by our habits.”
“We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”Reciting these quotes and looking over 10,000+ self-help books on amazon, at least sympathise me that I am not the only human who searches “hacks to wake up early” on google every Sunday.
Why does this happen? What we could do? Weak Commitments?
ROLE
Data Analysis, Research,
Data Visualisation, Illustration,
Product Design, UI/UX Design
TIMELINE
3 Months
Dec 2020 - Jan 2021
COLLAB.
DISCOVERING & RESEARCH
Wendy Wood has a point there! But what are these patterns? And how do we find them? The profound method, as mostly used by baby boomers, is to keep a record of their thoughts and everyday responses in their daily diary - which is proved after a small research, time-consuming.
As usual, technology is on its way to help us out. A system called ‘Personal informatics’ titles an intriguing area of human-computer interaction. These systems help oneself better understand their behaviour by making them participate in both the collection of their behavioural information and the reflection and understanding of that information.
Practically speaking, the Fitbit on our wrist is like a pawn on the Personal Informatics board. It records and monitors the number of steps we took every day, the calories we ingested and the hours we slept - so that we can track ourselves like Life Hackers!
Well, pervasive and ubiquitous technology with its whole range of sensors is slowly integrating with its big brother, data. Thanks to Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, to introduce us to The Quantified Self Movement. The main idea of the movement was to increase self-knowledge and self-determination through numbers.
For example, someone might use a technological gadget to study and record their productivity with multiple data points like ‘hours they spent working’ or ‘number of times they got distracted by a ping’. And once they notice correlations between those data points, they can make a change and say to themself, “I’m not going to put my phone on general anymore because it makes me inattentive.”
The science is - when we collect insights for analysis in the future or aggregate data about our past, we try to get another panorama on ourselves - one that is not attainable from unaided thinking. Just that awareness that we are being recorded and our actions are being monitored, drives us to get more positives in ourselves.
GOALS
1
Find the cause of my messed up sleep routine. And to understand how my daily activities are impacting quality of my sleep.
2
How might I introduce a factor of motivation, so that I can make a strong commitment for my habits.
DATA ANALYSIS & VISUALISATIONS
I have been recording different data points of my sleep and activities for a week. Some days I sleep for more than ten hours while there are some days I hardly sleep. I have started using my fancy Fitbit watch to track my sleep now. I have been wearing this twenty-first-century gadget almost every day and got addicted to it. So much addictive, that the Fitbit app has swapped my morning social media addiction.
I take my jumbled up everyday routine as a bundle of bad habits, a negative behaviour pattern. And after the week-long research about personal informatics and quantified self, I believe that if we can quantify our behaviour, we can even change it to live a healthier life.
MIDNIGHT SLEEP / NIGHT
I never wondered about that, but now if I see the median of the time when I go to bed which is around 4o’clock! In other words, I am most likely to feel going to bed after midnight.
This graph would definitely add features (positive or negative?) to my “morning sleep routine.” This week was in a festive + productive mode. Hence, I can see myself altering my sleeping hours, almost everyday.
The graph seems like a bimodal distribution, which in a little fancy way - explains how I felt sleepy after nights with small sleeping hours and then I compensated that tiredness with the sleep on the next night (or morning).
Adding to that, no matter how little I sleep, my cycles have a positive correlation with each other. Which most of the time prevent me from going into psychological states like sleep inertia. It's the same reason why I still don’t feel much sleepy even after small sleeping hours.
MINUTES ACTIVE / DAY
Not that I am fussing about my weight loss dedication, I decided on a goal of walking at least 8000 steps each day. Though I am not able to attain those many every day, I have a mean of 6,034 step counts - which is satisfactory.
RELATION BETWEEN SLEEP & DAILY ACTIVITIES
I found a small correlation between my sleep quality and Daily burning of Calories. These two graphs showcases how most of the time, my calories intake impact my sleep.
IDEATIONS
Analysing my sleep-activity data and my daily unconscious actions related to it, I decided to majorly focus on the idea of Motivation. For me, Fitbit dashboard was a great booster. But most of the times if I didn’t notice any physical change, I am used to skip and relax my goals.
#1 THE LOST TOUCH WITH CIRCARDIAN CYCLE
A redesign of my analog wall clock, with added features. The clock is expected to get sync with your body clock and alarm you accordingly.
#2 NEVER GO TO BED WITH
AN ARGUMENT
Never go to bed with an argument is a must for quality sleep. For me, it's not a partner to argue with (sad life?), but it's my brain. Before sleep hits, I always look over those empty walls, thinking about worthless problems for hours. After doing small secondary research, I found out that journal writing is a profound method, people use to overcome this problem. That pushed me to ideate on this area -
#3 ITS JUST NOT A PHOTO FRAME
While I was looking for an object to get integrated as my motivational object I found dream catchers, hourglasses and alarm clock. But those weren’t something which was clicking my mind. It was then this “Photo Frame of a sunflower” hanging in my room - found to beinteresting to design.
Precisely, I was trying to design about how might I represent my everyday actions and habits for better reflection and motivation. Now this design introduce “Plantie” - just like your pet doggie, which behaves according to your mood. If you sleep well, exercise enough and takecare of your health - the plant in your photo frame will rise and shine. However, if you failed to meet your everyday recommended goals, the flower will keep on depleting and there would bea time when you will have to reset this electronic frame.
PRODUCT DESIGN
The primary learning, as inspired by Duke and his master, is to understand that motivation and reflection are as important as the efforts to be made towards our goal.
For this project, I was focussing on how might I motivate myself to reflect and to acquire a healthy lifestyle. I didn’t want any dog or duke to motivate me, but I was looking for something which could integrate into my environment. While I was looking for that object, I found dreamcatchers, hourglasses and an alarm clock in my shortlist. But those weren’t something that was clicking my mind. It was then this “Photo Frame of a sunflower” hanging in my room - found to be interesting to design.
The design introduces “Plantie” - just like your pet doggie, which behaves according to your mood. If you sleep well, exercise enough and take care of your health - the plant in your photo frame will rise and shine. However, if you failed to meet your everyday recommended goals, the flower will keep on depleting and there would be a time when you will have to reset this electronic frame.
This e-frame, like any other photo frame, exhibits a nice beautiful flower. But unlike other frames, it uses data from our self-tracking device to revamp the beauty of the flower. In a little fancier way, the frame represents your daily actions and goals accomplishments in a visual representation of a flower.
The brainstorming for this dynamic electronic frame was inspired by the macintosh dynamic wallpapers. The Mac OS dynamic wallpaper continuously alters its lightenings according to the time of the day.
APP DESIGN
Your Daily Activities like eating, sleeping or exercising is collected by self-trackers. The design is based on an assumption that the user uses these self-trackers like smart watches. Those data will then be automatically analysed in the application. The automated code tries to make relations between your daily life data points and reflect the same into the health page.
LET's BE CRITICAL
REFLECTION
After this project, I realised that I have been noting and recording my every day in a way or other. The only difference is that now I am more reflective and aware of what I am doing. Thanks to Fitbit, that it acted like my mom and showed me - my quantified self.
I always had a soft corner for Data and its wonders. That could be because my mind always realises that I am interacting with data every day. However, this idea of “quantifying self” was new for me. I knew that tech giants are taking my data to provide me with a personalised user experience (or whatsoever). But I never looked into how they analyse it and transform it into something useful.
Still a follower of George Orwell, but these 10 days made me realised the significance of big data. Not that Orwell was against it, it just that I was introduced to big data as an asset to surveillance capitalism. Now that I experienced how the data is recorded, analysed and represented - I am less hesitant to tick that terms & condition box at every signup page.
Apart from data making me curious and fascinated every day, I realised a great empathising technique. Because of this "COVID: Stuck at Home" Situation, I tried to design for myself. Obviously, you can’t perform the self-quantifying exercise on others - otherwise, it will destroy its meaning. But this technique of doing primary research on oneself was mind-blowing. At first, I had a thought that my design wouldn’t find and encounter a real problem. But that was just after I talked to some people (for my extended primary research), I realised that I can be a user too! And understanding the problem at the self-level is the ultimate way itself. There could be biasedness, but if I can design a product to solve my problem - I could be a better designer or at least a self-aware human being!
