Project #5 Data Portrait
Code of the sketch If sound is not audible please open in editor.
Description
For this assignment, I spent a week tracking a personal habit to create a data-self portrait. I'm a sweet-tooth, I love eating candies and am obsessed. So I decided to actually record the number of times I actually eat it throughout the day. This data as tracked for an entire week and onto a numbered list everytime it happened, and translated the list into an array in p5.js.
Design Process
While I was tracking my habit of eating candies I realised that I usually think about it or crave it when I'm bored or stressed, although they are unrelated moods they indicate an state of extreme thinking.
Hence to represent the data collected in a way of indicating that its a habit of boredom, instantly the pink panther came into my mind because the theme song is something that randomly keeps playing in my head at such times.
And I find myself grooving randomly to it. Then I decided to transalte my data portrait into a pink panther which orders candies whenever its bored. Hence in this sketch it clicks in fingers to order a plate of candies. The candies
are eaten within seconds and empty plate disappears, a new one arrives. The day and time of each entry is displayed at the right corner of the sketch as an indication of digital clock at an imaginary candy bar.
Reflection
When I was getting started at making a pink panther sort of character in my sketch I thought it would take me alot of time but I focused on breaking it down to primitive 2d shapes and fine tuned the pixel values of each component and was very happy with the way it turned out, to up my design I gave it a monochromatic look. The practie in lab classes made animating the candies pretty easy for me. I initially was very confused using arrays and couldn't understand how to translate my time data into array but having found a way I feel very confident in using such arrays. I also spent alot of time trying to get the sound I incorporated to work in the sketch. But the best realisation for me was that I thought I had a bad habit of eating too many sweets but with tracking it was clear I don't have anything to worry about. I never thought tracking habits that worry us could put us into ease and I'll be doing more tracking from now on.