1920 – Yakama Time Ball

Women from the Yakama Native American tribe used strings of hemp as personal diaries. Each major event in their life was represented by a knot, a bead or a shell. This mnemonic device is called an Ititamat, or counting-the-days ball, or simply time ball. The first image shows an Ititamat created before 1920. On the second image, each string is a different Ititamat. The last image shows a 2003 replica. A young woman would use a time ball to record her courtship, marriage, and other experiences […]

Women from the Yakama Native American tribe used strings of hemp as personal diaries. Each major event in their life was represented by a knot, a bead or a shell. This mnemonic device is called an Ititamat, or counting-the-days ball, or simply time ball. The first image shows an Ititamat created before 1920. On the second image, each string is a different Ititamat. The last image shows a 2003 replica. A young woman would use a time ball to record her courtship, marriage, and other experiences using a system of knots and beads that only she could decipher. As she grew older, a woman might have several time balls with which to share her life story or keep those memories private. When she passed on, they were buried with her. The ball of twine grew in size as time passed and as events occurred. The women would sometimes divide the twine into 25-year lengths to make it more manageable. When the women were very old, they could use the knots and beads of their time balls to recall not only what happened in their lives but when the events occurred. They could easily recount when their children were born, when they moved away, and other major experiences. Sources: Helen H. Schuster (1990) The Yakima. pp. 33-35. Lone Grey Squirrel (2007) Time Ball. Marjanović D., Štorga M., Škec S., Bojčetić N., Pavković N. (2018) Data Objects: Design Principles for Data physicalization. First image from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Second image from Schuster's book (ibid). p. 35. Third image from ideiasdefora.com. Artefact exhibited in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Washington D. C. Related: Also see our entry on Torres Strait Islanders tallies and on the Polynesian Genealogical Instrument.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: anthropology, preliterate, self-logging, social use

1993 – Slumber: Brainwave Weaving

Slumber was a multi-year gallery installation/performance by artist Janine Antoni. From the website description: Performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, EEG Machine and artist’s REM reading. Antoni transforms the fleeting act of dreaming into a sculptural process. Between 1994 and 2000, the artist slept in the bed while an electroencephalograph machine recorded her eye movement. During the day, Antoni would sit at the loom and weave shreds of her nightgown in the pattern of her REM. The […]

Slumber was a multi-year gallery installation/performance by artist Janine Antoni. From the website description: Performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, EEG Machine and artist’s REM reading. Antoni transforms the fleeting act of dreaming into a sculptural process. Between 1994 and 2000, the artist slept in the bed while an electroencephalograph machine recorded her eye movement. During the day, Antoni would sit at the loom and weave shreds of her nightgown in the pattern of her REM. The patterns were woven into the blanket that covered the artist as she slept at night. In developing Slumber, the artist researched dreams from the vantage of mythology, art history, psychoanalysis, and science. Through her performance, she uses mythology to reinterpret the scientific. As Antoni discusses – “Science had made a machine for the body to make a drawing. I love the idea that if art comes from the unconscious, then this particular drawing is coming straight from the unconscious onto the page without an intercession of the conscious mind.” Source: http://www.janineantoni.net/slumber/

Added by: Judith Donath. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: brainwaves, dreams, EEG, fabric, self-logging, sleep, weaving

2008 – Psychogeographical Mapping: Travel Logging with LEGO bricks

American artist Cory Imig reconstructed the layout of the city of Savannah using LEGO bricks, and over the course of one month she added a colored brick every time she went to a particular place. Each color is a different day of the week. Source: Cory Imig (2008) Psychogeographical Mapping (see the section Documenting of her Web page for more data sculptures).

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Loren Madsen. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: data sculpture, LEGO, self-logging, temporal data, travels

2011 – Blip: A Year of Travel

In his experiments with visualizing data from Tripit to look back at his own (and other people's) travel, Cemre Güngör came up with a new system to create data sculptures from one's travels over time. This work is of a particular interest, in that it shows an excellent example of how a physical visualization design process unfolds, with many questions unique to physicalization add up to the challenge of designing an effective visual representation, i.e., contrasting materials and treatments […]

In his experiments with visualizing data from Tripit to look back at his own (and other people's) travel, Cemre Güngör came up with a new system to create data sculptures from one's travels over time. This work is of a particular interest, in that it shows an excellent example of how a physical visualization design process unfolds, with many questions unique to physicalization add up to the challenge of designing an effective visual representation, i.e., contrasting materials and treatments were done to embody varying representations and evoke different feelings from the viewer. The initial premise for Blip was to create a physical ‘lens’ into travel-related data. It should not be a literal representation of the data; it should not be immediately straightforward, but rather should reveal its nature to the viewer upon examination; it should enable the viewer to observe the dataset through different filters by looking at the object from different angles. Cemre's exploration started with a wood sculpture representing a timeline of flights longitudinally: Here, each flight is depicted as a wooden block shaped like an arc, where the volume of the block is proportional to the length of the flight (Figure 17). Blocks are ordered in a chronological fashion in the vertical axis, whereas the horizontal position is reflective of the longitudinal distance covered by the flight. Flights that cover small longitudinal distances appear as 'peaks', since making the area of those blocks proportional to flight length requires elongating them. There are computer-generated ripples on the surfaces of the curves to make it possible to visually differentiate flights of the same route that happen sequentially. However, the above representation "provided a meaningful visualization only from one angle, the top. Looking at the sculpture facing the blocks or from the side did not provide different insights.". Cemre moved on to transparent acrylic, as a support to "look into one's past". The first iteration using this medium was a depiction of great circle arcs followed by each flight. Blip’s choice of a transparent block as a moldable material was one of relevancy, for the material best represents the feeling of ‘looking into’ one's past. This form and substance facilitates observation from different angles. Top view showing the flight trajectories on a map. Side view showing one year of flight. While this design better alogned with Cemre's intent of enabling seeing the data from different angles, using a map as a support to plot the data was not fully satisfying to him: While I started off with visualizing itineraries on a map, I quickly realized that plotting flights on a map wasn’t translating to something that had emotional impact. After going through follow up designs (see thesis for details), Cemre shifted the main concept so as to move away from the visualization of the actual mecanics of travel. In the final design of Blip, data about the user and the nature of time spent on a trip also come into play. I abandoned the map in favor of an abstract representation that shows each trip in relative locations to home, and depicted their length and purpose. Here, the central circle represents home, and all colored circles correspond to a single trip. Colors depict the purpose of the trip (i.e., blue for "just business", green for "more business than leisure", orange for "more leisure than business", etc...), distance to the center is mapped to the distance from home. Each slice of the stack represent a month in the year. Sources: Cemre Güngör website : http://cem.re/cemre-gungor Cemre Güngör. Blip. A personal data sculpture. Masters' thesis. NYU’s Brooklyn Experimental Media Center. December 2011. Reverse Time Machine: Visualizing a Year Of Travel Data, by Amy Jackson • January 24, 2012. (tipit.com blog)

Added by: Fanny Chevalier. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: see-through, self-logging, temporal data, travel

2013 – Examined Life: Giving Shape to Activities

Designer Alex Getty logged his daily activities for 40 days and turned them into data sculptures that look like colored paper origami. Source: Alex Getty (2013) The Examined Life

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: activity data, origami, paper, self-logging

2015 – Life in Clay: Sharing Memories through Data Pottery

Alice Thudt, a PhD student in Computational Media Design, crafts pieces of pottery that embody data about moments she shared with her loved ones. Left image (2015): cereal bowls showing Skype-call history between Alice and her parents. On the front bowl, each line represents a day where they skyped. On the other bowl, each dot represents 10 min of call time. She offered a bowl as a present to her parents and kept the other one as a reminder to stay in touch every time she has breakfast. Middle […]

Alice Thudt, a PhD student in Computational Media Design, crafts pieces of pottery that embody data about moments she shared with her loved ones. Left image (2015): cereal bowls showing Skype-call history between Alice and her parents. On the front bowl, each line represents a day where they skyped. On the other bowl, each dot represents 10 min of call time. She offered a bowl as a present to her parents and kept the other one as a reminder to stay in touch every time she has breakfast. Middle image (2016): teapot showing instant messages containing the word "love" that Alice and her boyfriend exchanged since they started dating. Each dotted line represents one year; one dot stands for 10 messages. The teapot shows how they went from a long-distance relationship to recent years when they were geographically closer and texting was less necessary. Right image (2016): bowl showing the productivity of Alice's boyfriend over the course of one year, offered to him as a birthday gift – the outside surface shows git commits, while the inside shows the number of emails sent per month. Life in Clay explores turning data about my life and the lives of my loved ones into functional pottery. By making objects that can be touched, loved and used every day I want to give our elusive personal data a physical presence. The pattern of each handcrafted artifact represents a precious memory, experience or relationship that I want to remember or remind others of. The data pots create opportunities for the stories hidden in my data to be serendipitously reencountered, shared over dinner with friends or silently reflected upon with a cup of coffee on the couch. Sources: Alice Thudt (2017) Life in Clay. Alice Thudt, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale (2017) Data Craft: Integrating Data into Daily Practices and Shared Reflections.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: tableware, hand-made, mementos, memories, personal data, pottery, self-logging

2016 – Dataponics: Human-Vegetal Play

“Dataponics: Human-Vegetal Play” maps human physical activity measured by a Fitbit to the amount of light and water fed to a potted plant. Also, the system measures the moisture in the growing hydroponic medium (in this case, expanded clay) that surrounds the plant’s roots, and plays different internet radio stations accordingly. Source: Cercos, R., Nash, A., Yuille, J., Goddard, W. (2016) Coupling quantified bodies: affective possibilities of self-quantification beyond the self

Added by: Robert Cercos. Category: Active physical visualization Tags: plants, self-logging

2017 – Wearable Self

Wearable Self is a collection of data jewelry which is Jiyeon Kang's master's thesis project at Parsons School of Design. South Korean designer Jiyeon Kang transformed a year of self-tracking data (e.g. daily steps) gathered by Fitbit and iPhone Health into personalized fashion items that can hold and wear. Through laser cut and 3d printing with different materials, the designer creates customizable fashion items generated by users' self-data, aiming to make self-tracking data more meaningful […]

Wearable Self is a collection of data jewelry which is Jiyeon Kang's master's thesis project at Parsons School of Design. South Korean designer Jiyeon Kang transformed a year of self-tracking data (e.g. daily steps) gathered by Fitbit and iPhone Health into personalized fashion items that can hold and wear. Through laser cut and 3d printing with different materials, the designer creates customizable fashion items generated by users' self-data, aiming to make self-tracking data more meaningful for individuals who use wearable devices. Where fashion design meets data visualization, Wearable Self creates unique business opportunities in personalized fashion and allows users to interact with their own data while it opens a new conversation related to data ownership and self-identity. "With the maturity of wearable technology, we are all unconsciously gathering activity data from our everyday movement by the sensors on our smartphone and wearable devices. The quantified self, which is a movement to track and quantify every aspect of lives with tracking technologies, has started to go mainstream. However, in many cases, those numbers gathered by fitness trackers often fail to make meaningful connections with us. We might get a better sense of self-awareness by looking at those real-time graphs displayed on data dashboards, but as time passes, it’s obvious that the data streams lose its context. Can those endless streams of self-data, which show traces of our lives, be more memorable beyond data dashboards? In this context, my thesis Wearable Self attempts to turn self-tracking data that belongs to us into art that can be mementos for individuals. I believe that making self-data tangible and wearable opens a business opportunity in terms of personalization and customization in fashion design." (Kang, 2017) Sources: See details on Jiyeon Kang's portfolio. Wearable Self: Your Data Jewelry (project webpage.)

Added by: Jiyeon Kang. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: activity data, data jewellery, Fashion Design, Quantified Self, self-logging

2019 – Sleep Blanket

A visualization of my son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep. Source: Seung Lee (2019) Twitter thread. Related: Also see our entry 2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Steffen (@s1effen). Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: baby, data clothing, fabric, self-logging, sleep

2024 – Travels on the Wind

Travels on the Wind is a tangible data visualization of a decade of travel. Each year is represented by a vertical thread with rings and beads encoding data about trip duration, region, season, transportation, accommodation, and companions. The piece was handcrafted over several months using 3D-printed elements, jewelry findings, and UV epoxy resin. Suspended from driftwood, it is both a personal story and a physical expression of data art. Sources: Project’s website Information is […]

Travels on the Wind is a tangible data visualization of a decade of travel. Each year is represented by a vertical thread with rings and beads encoding data about trip duration, region, season, transportation, accommodation, and companions. The piece was handcrafted over several months using 3D-printed elements, jewelry findings, and UV epoxy resin. Suspended from driftwood, it is both a personal story and a physical expression of data art. Sources: Project’s website Information is Beautiful Awards

Added by: Natalia Kiseleva. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: self-logging, personal data, 3D printing, travels, jewelry