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By taking the percent daily values for essential nutrients and displaying it as a visual block puzzle in the likeness of Tetris, I hope to make the challenge of creating a balanced diet easier, and possibly even fun. The blocks really help to embody the idea of fulfilling nutrition as they fill towards the daily recommended values (Dourish), and they embrace the complexity of the data in not altering the puzzle but simply changing how it presented (ViƩgas & Wattenberg). Percent daily value is used for simplicity and to give the user a very clear visual cue as to how close they are to meeting the daily recommended values. This also helps create the 'forceful point of view', as the use of percentage will make the end user believe that anything other than 100% is not good enough.

The visualization works as follows: users select ingredients from the right. Ingredients which are selected have their nutritional content stacked on top of one another, creating blocks which rise towards the daily recommended intake, and then toward the maximum recommended daily intake once the recommended quantity is surpassed. The goal of the user is to find the right balance of food they plan to consume that day to maximize the number of nutrients at the recommended intake while keeping everything below the maximum recommended intake. Since the visualization is interactive it does not need to remain static, and as such it is possible for entire sections to become collapsable. If a section is collapsed, the visualization will instead depict the average of each element in the section, and new ingredients will only depict how they will change that average. This interaction essentially makes creating a balanced diet an interactive visual puzzle since people are generally much better with visual puzzles.

The data for daily recommended values will come from the USDA, as they seems to have the most complete set of data, and the food visualized will be up to the end user. The end user should be able to select nutritional information from a wide variety of simple ingredients, specify the amount of each ingredient, and create and visualize full meals or a series of meals to gain a better grasp of how well they are nourishing themselves.


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