How I Made It:
43 Days: Notes On My Perfectionism
43 Days: Notes On My Perfectionism is inspired by Data Humanism, a movement that encourages designers to move away from a merely technical approach to data, to one that is more human. Two of my favourite examples of data humanist work are 1374 Days, My Journey With Long Covid by Giorgia Lupi and collaborators; and Dear Data, a project Giorgia undertook with Stefanie Posavec.
I mentioned to my psychologist how frustrated I was with how I couldn’t get a handle on my perfectionism and the very high standards I set for myself. In response, my psychologist suggested I journal the areas of my life where my perfectionism shows up. So, I decided to collect data on my perfectionism to create my own data humanist project. Whenever I noticed my perfectionism in my day to day life, I entered my data into a spreadsheet and recorded the date, the time, where I was, and my thoughts and feelings.
The data humanist approach encourages designers to draw with their data to gain insights.
I did this by visualising every data point with a triangle (I had a triangle glue stick on hand) and drawing coloured stripes within those triangles that corresponded with the different areas of my life that came up in each of those data points. I realised during this process that my self-compassion was an interesting theme that recurred through my data set and needed to be a main element of my visualisation.
Drawing with data
Data humanism also encourages designers to adapt different visual languages in their visualisations.
It was a challenge to figure out how to visualise my data in a more polished way, so I looked through Dear Data for inspiration. Giorgia’s visualisation in Week 7 (pictured below) using the symbols of music notation was always a favourite of mine. I’ve grown up playing the clarinet so it was delightful to see a visual language I was so familiar with be used in another context.
I pictured my perfectionism data on a timeline, and music notation is also organised by time, so I decided to play with the structure and visual language of music notation to visualise my data.
I began by brainstorming the music symbols I knew, then started to allocate these symbols to different elements of my data.
A challenge I ran into while adapting this visual language was because I’m a classically trained musician, I had to fight the urge to use those symbols correctly, as if someone would actually be playing my visualisation like music.
I went back to Giorgia’s Week 7 visualisation and saw how she adapted musical symbols, and then wrote a note to myself (pictured below). The note read, “I can read sheet music, so I know what rules I would need to follow to ensure it could be played by an instrument. For this vis, I give myself permission to break those rules.” Another note reads, “the purpose of this is to communicate my data, not to actually compose music”. This change in perspective helped me move forward with this project.
At the time of collecting data, I was experiencing symptoms and triggers of post-traumatic stress, and I was surprised to find that they showed up in my data because I assumed they weren’t related to my perfectionism. I experienced a breakthrough when I realised I could use the trill symbol to visualise these triggers.
The sound of a trill can feel panicked because it involves rapidly alternating between two different notes. The symbol of the trill is also often accompanied by the letters ‘tr’, which happen to be the first two letters of both ‘trauma’ and ‘trigger’.
This was a breakthrough because I had found a solid example of how taking into account the traditional meanings of music symbols can enhance their meaning in a data visualisation.
The relationship between my triggers and self-compassion was the most interesting in my data set, so I focused on this relationship in my visualisation. I found the symbol of the ‘turn’ to represent my self compassion and the reflection that often goes along with it. Where the trill sounds panicked, the turn symbol is more melodic and beautiful. I also liked the curved nature of the turn symbol to represent my self compassion and reflection because it has a reflexive and decorative quality to it.
I drew up my first full draft using the language of music notation, but it looked too much like actual sheet music. It was important that it be clear from the first look that this was a data visualisation, and not an actual music composition.
Drawing up the first full draft
So I stylised the symbols to become closer to what they look like in the final version of the visualisation. I chose one section of my visualisation and did multiple versions using different materials, including acrylic paint, Posca pens, embossing, linoprinting, watercolour and stickers.
A timelapse of material experiments with painting, embossing and Posca pens
As a nod to the history of music notation and how it used to be printed on a printing press, I decided to visualise my data by mixing pigment ink and stamping the symbols with custom rubber stamps.
Mixing pigment ink to make custom stamp pads
Stamping with my custom stamps
Data humanism enables designers to facilitate deeper connections to themselves and other people through data.
So I decided to create a way for people to share the imperfect moments of their lives using my custom stamps. This collaborative exercise is designed to accompany the data visualisation of my perfectionism.
I also designed this project as a means to advocate for the data humanist perspective, so a booklet that argues for this perspective also accompanies this data visualisation.
During my material experimentation, I also had an audio version of the data that consisted of an audio description of each bar. When I played this for people, I learnt that what people actually expected from an audio version was to hear what my visualisation sounded like as music. Although I hadn’t designed my visualisation to be a music composition, there is still a huge interest in hearing it. So stay tuned!
Click here to see the full project.