Critical Analysis #3 - Visual Analytics

The topic I chose to visually represent was the amount of money that production companies spend to create movies along with a comparison of their return on investment. The reason I chose this topic is because my brother is a walking factsheet on various movies and he would always tell me how large the budget was for a particular movie and I would always be shocked at the amount of money that was put into producing that movie. I wondered whether people were aware of how much money is being spent in the entertainment industry in creating movies and how much of this entertainment culture we as movie-goers are feeding into.

I want to examine the relationship between work and play in the areas that we inhabit. I am interested in where people spend time doing formal work and where they spend time doing recreation. It is meaningful to me to see the societal dynamics of where and when work gets done. In a place such as CMU when time is a commodity that must be managed carefully, I think it would be interesting to be able to visualize this information.

A system of representation that encourages people to browse unnoticed books.

My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.

As a novice cook who just moved off campus, one of the most intimidating aspects of making lunch and dinner everyday is having to work with the ingredients. It can be scary trying out new combinations and having a dish completely fail. Personally, I have fallen back on 2 or 3 dishes that I am comfortable with instead of trying out new recipes. What I have created here is a visualization that shows every existing connection between different ingredients, the cuisine they are used in, the technique used to cook them etc. In this way, I hope to not only provide a way of comfortably testing new materials, but also a way to visualize how food differs between cultures and time periods.

A project to highlight danger zones in League of Legends and help provide areas of improvement

Where To Intern? is a data visualization for students to easily understand data about where other students have interned over the summers and how much they enjoyed it.

Recent technological developments have enabled individuals to enjoy television shows whenever they want. However, this has lead to increasingly concerning TV consumption habits. This project aims to represent these concerns in a visual way to discourage over watching TV.

As a CMU student, we usually feel that it is hard to balance our life and work. Like in freshmen year, students are not used to college life and normally put on weight which we know as "Freshmen 15". Therefore,time management becomes a serious problem to us. This project collects data from users' everyday life and visualizes the data in order to give feedback to help them make better time management plan. It is a mobile app, user should record how long they spend time on work, sleep and other each day. And the app will generate a map to visualize the data. Over some period of time, we can see our life pattern, for example, do we procrastinate or plan-ahead on work. This can help us solve problems and make better decisions to balance our life.

Going to the bathroom is an inevitable part of life. People only go when they have to and try to spend as little time there as possible. It's an inconvenient speed bump in our daily routines and there's nothing really to gain from going. But what if there was some benefit? Like blood tests, urine tests are often conducted at doctor's appointments to reveal different things about a person's health at a glance. What if toilets conducted urine tests every time a person went to the bathroom and offered that data to people in an easy to understand way?

For those of you who don’t know, the goal of the ice bucket challenge was to raise awareness for Lou Gehrig’s disease, which is a disease that causes the degeneration of neurons and leads to loss of muscular functions. By representing the spread of the ice bucket challenge as neurons and synapses, I plan to send a message about the effectiveness of the ice bucket challenge in raising awareness for Lou Gehrig's disease.

Meeting and talking to stranger is a different experience for each person. But can the experience be influenced by the region a person grew up in? Growing up in Alabama and then moving to Pittsburgh, I've noticed that people act differently when interacting with a stranger depending on which region they're from. Thus, I've decided to explore how it could be true for all kinds of different regions in the US.

On campus, we have many different sports facilities available to us. We have basketball, squash, tennis, soccer, swimming, weight-lifting areas, and football fields to use. People use them everyday, but many times, find that these facilities are overcrowded, or in some cases, there are not enough people there to play pickup games with. For example, when some friends go to play basketball in the UC, they find that there are too little people there to start a pickup game. Or it could be the reverse and there are too many people, so they have to wait for an hour before they can play. If they knew beforehand about this information, they might have decided to pick another time or day to play, and could have saved themselves time and effort.

An interactive visualization for nutritional information.

Something that Matters much to me is my computer, well, video games specifically. My one problem is you don't really get to see the numbers, who's playing what, how can I join in? A simple visualization could help gamers put into perspective which games can connect them most with the communit. For Reference to the Title, watch the creative commercials for Call of Duty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0-kIT0W1UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RPxJvy5CfM

My goal is to show the correlation between fast food consumption and health problems in the United States. In addition, I would like to draw attention to the large increase in fast food consumption over the last few decades. I plan to do this in a way that is familiar to much of the population and easy to understand: a chart in the form of a calendar.

This project provides a more cohesive way of understanding the diversity of CMU through a simple, easy to understand visualization of students' background data. -Data from 2014 enrollment gathered from SIS. Permission of use from department head.

Coffee. It is something that almost all of us include in our daily rituals, but we often forget how much of a “ritual” this is for us. We forget that the little details of how we drink our coffee, when we drink it, where and how much are symbolic of our cultural trends and values. Data collected on the intricate ways in which each culture experiences coffee can be used to create an installation that will allow us all to experience and understand coffee, thus bridging the “culture gap,” the “language barrier”. We can understand each other and our mentalities through a ritual as simple and yet as complex and specific as coffee, and the embedded significance of the coffee experience.

We as people share many things in common. We all eat, breathe, and sleep - and we all wear clothing (well, most of the time). For some, choice of clothing may not be a big deal. But in the end, deciding what to wear every day is a decision shared by all of us living in civilized community.

Sending and receiving emails is a seemingly quick and effective way to contact someone who's schedule is unknown or different from one's own. However, once emails start piling up, how much time is spent actually reading, sorting through, and responding to emails?

Collecting daily movement data to gain insight and understanding on the users posture, motion, and activities.

Wi-fi Waves is a visualization of nearby wi-fi hotspots on campus. By combining data streams like wi-fi strength and bandwidth usage with geographical location, this interface is aimed at improving the search for an internet-accessible workplace.

This project aims to suggest a prototype design for a medical interface that will provide patient information to consulting physicians in a more efficient manner than surveys or questionnaires in order to better direct the patient-doctor discussions in the limited amount of time available during a short appointment.