Data is beautiful
By: Jasper Jeurens
Tags: Social Technology, Young Parents, Data Visualization, Baby Sleep

In my effort to explain to my friends and colleagues the research topic I am exploring, I haphazardly used an example of my private life to illustrate my point. It resonated surprisingly well.

So what am I talking about? For the past 8 or 9 months, me and my girlfriend have been quantified selfing (quantifying ourselves?). Well, not ourselves exactly, but in a way still. More about that later. We had been meticulously gathering data about our newborn son’s sleeping and eating habits, initially inspired by this post on reddit/r/dataisbeautiful.

Something I am a bit shy to share with the world or even close friends, because why on earth would you want to quantify your own baby, reducing a human being to a piece of statistic? These are some insights I can share about this topic:

First of all, we never intended to do this for so long, which meant it actually yielded some kind of value for us to keep doing it. I now realise what that value is. It doesn’t come from the actual value of the data itself (in fact, we’re not too fuzzed about our baby’s performance), but the act of entering the data was a way for us to connect, share experiences and reflect on the day:

At the end of each day, when we went to bed, I would take my excel sheet and start talking and asking about what happened that day, while filling in the relevant data. For both me and my girlfriend, this became a moment of quiet contemplation in an otherwise rather stressful environment of dealing with things new parents are meant to deal with. In a way, this conversation was probably just as much about us and how we survived the day, rather than the particular sleeping habits of our baby. Furthermore, it helped us put rough days into perspective more easily by looking into the past, which meant that compared to previous periods in time, today might actually not have been as bad we thought. Or in some cases, provide some comfort in the visual knowledge that everything seems to be a temporary phase, and even the hardships eventually pass (after which new hardships inevitably present itself…)

What certainly also helped was that the input data was immediately visualised in the same excel sheet; turns out I am a simple sucker for pretty patterns and visualisations. Sometimes I caught myself feeling disappointed when the new data would mess up with emerging patterns or cause other visual misalignments, which is kind of funny in itself and shows the disconnect of what the data represents, and how we experience it. I think the visualisation is beautiful in its granularity: on a macro scale, or zoomed out view, you can see the general development of our baby growing 1 year old, adopting a day-night rhythm, experience alternating periods of relative entropy and rest, gradually moving from breast feeding to solid foods, and slowly grow into a pattern of 2 sleeps a day.

Both dimensions are set in time; the hours of the day horizontally (starting and ending in midnight), and the days of the year vertically. Each ‘pixel’ is a unit of 10 minutes. Sleep is marked black, while breastfeeding, bottle feeding and solid foods are coloured yellow, green and blue respectively (not very colourblind friendly, I’m afraid).

But at the same time, on a micro scale the visualisation still offers enough information to actually get an idea of what was going on that day: was there a fever, did he wake up that night, were we travelling a lot, etc.

A snapshot of when a heatwave hit the Netherlands; this made sleeping later in the afternoon near impossible until it cooled down somewhat, close to midnight. At the time, I vividly remember the desperation.

Which still leaves the question how this relates to my current research subject, which centers around designing more elegant examples of social technology. This is all there is to it: it represents an example of technology (in this case a simple excel sheet) providing more value than its apparent functional purpose: it is not the data information that really matters, but its ability to bring us together, comfort us, and possibly support our relationship in other ways. This fits the narrative I wish to articulate, in which I prefer to design for increased connectedness and perceived relationship (for example a ‘wishing well’ that increases awareness of another workplace), rather than designing the functional transferring of information (creating a slack channel to share documents more effectively).

Previously, I would get trapped in sketching a world where digital technology is contrasted against a social (use) context, but it took an example from my own experience to help me realise elegant examples of social technology can come in weird shapes or forms, waiting to be designed for.

And that, is beautiful.