Relate to the Reading

In order to accomplish graphical excellence for my project, I have a clear purpose for the graph, showing the life pattern of user and might help the user to figure out the following questions like why do I feel sleepy all the time? Do I procrastinate on work?Why do I put on weight?How productive and efficient am I this month? Should I continue to live like this or should I change a way to spend my time? Also,when the user is recording what they do that day help them raise the awareness of time management. To add, this graph shows the data accurately, the color helps to clarify the time division and the color can indicate the mood of the user that day. And presenting lots of data of time division in a clear and simple graph and the continuous color change makes the data look more coherent, which also helps the user the compare the data just by looking at the different colors. This map also has a broad view and and detailed structure. Help users not only to get a broad idea but also can refer to specific information. From the Reading of Viegas and Wattenburg, it indicates that forceful point of view is a powerful visualization of data that guides the viewer to a particular type of conclusion. I try to accomplish this in my project by using color scheme, since color is related to mood, red color normally gives people stress and tension while blue and green look more soothing.

Furthermore, my ideas are influenced by the time-series graphs from the graphical excellence reading, like the shifting balance of trade by the difference between the import and export time series graph designed by J.H. Lambert. It shows the pattern of the shifting balance of trade , using different colors to represent import and export, plotting them in a long period of time to show the pattern. I used the similar technique the show the broad view of time balance over time. My project is also related to the map of outgoing mail of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is also a time series map, showing a period pattern which help us to find a factor that influence the phenomenon. The goal of my project is to discover pattern and find out the reason that influence the pattern. Also, my design is also connects to the map of conductivity of copper, similar to comparison between temperature and conductivity, I have contrasting color for work and play.   

Feedback from team discussion

Last Friday during team discussion, my teammates suggested that I could use different color for work, sleep and other to generate a graph similar as heat graph. For example, when one day the user spend most of the time in working should be represented by a red peak in the map, the red color shows the tension of that day. And a day with mostly exercise may be represented by agreeable green. I found this suggestion very helpful, and therefore I incorporated the color idea in my design.