Process

The initial idea was to make use of viewing history from YouTube in some way; a digital data portrait using thumbnails of images that could be a way to share and reminisce about one's viewing history. At the same time, I was interested in any possible patterns in the viewing history and having a way to visualize that without poring through the data on Google Activity. This prompted me to think about abstracting the watched times from YouTube so that it can be exemplified in a physical form that could reflect the patterns in the data. Lastly, I had the idea to make it more physically engaging for the user rather than just being an ambient piece, even though I didn't actually want to make the device “interactive” per say. The final idea is inspired by Guitar Hero, and is simply a grid of lights that lights up based on my viewing history, with the 3 columns reflecting different years of my life.