Outcome

Background

One of the things I have noticed from moving from the heart of the south, Alabama, to a more northern city like Pittsburgh is that people behave differently when interacting with stranger. The phenomenon is especially evident in public spaces, such as elevators or buses. With that in mind, I’ve decided to focus on the effects that different geographical locations can have on people’s attitudes, specifically when interacting with people they do not know. The data would be collected by taking pictures of people interacting with strangers and then complied so that the pictures of people from a certain region were laid one on top of the other, until a single, general but fuzzy picture was created for each region. The idea was inspired by the visual data pieces Jason Salavon created, but instead of showing the trends over time that he used in his pieces dealing with human photographs, my project would show trends over regions, similar to Salavon’s real estate prints.

The project will focus on three main data streams:

1. The region each person in the group is from (and whether that does or does not make them part of the group)

2. The general fuzziness of the overall picture (how different is the body attitude of each individual person in the group)

3. The overall facial expressions and posture of the group of people (smiling, slumped, hand gestures, etc.)

Design

Data for the project will be collected by taking candid pictures of people talking to a stranger (the photographer) around different locations through the country. The pictures would all have to be of people facing forward, so that when the pictures are overlaid, a representative image of the people of the region as a whole would be created. The photo would also be taken in secret, so as to prevent the knowledge that they are being photographed change the people’s attitudes. I used feedback from my group to come up with controls for the project, which would allow for the data to be a more accurate reflection of each region that I represent. To create results that are more accurate and reflective of each region, follow-up questions such as whether the person is from around where the picture was taken and how long they have lived there would be asked after the picture was taken. The time each picture was taken, the conversation that was held, and the stranger each person had to talk to would all be consistent, so as to maintain control over the project. 

Data Streams

The project would employ three different data stream to get data that would most accurately reflect the different regions. Explicit region of which knowledge each participant is from would be used to group different pictures regions together so that each visual piece would accurately reflect the interactions with strangers of the people from one region. Fuzziness would be used to represent the data collected by implying how uniform the participants of a single region were with their body language and interactions. Fuzziness intuitively implies to people that something is harder to understand, so fuzziness in the visual displays would be easy for the observers to interpret as a sign that the reactions in a region are more varied and thus harder to categorize. The actual facial expression and body language of the participants would be used as the final data stream. The body language of the participants would give the observers an idea of how the participants as a whole felt about meeting and interacting with strangers. Different aspects of body language, such as whether the regions’ people tended to smile or use hand gestures, would serve as different points of data that could act individually or as a whole to provide the observer more information from which they could make their own conclusions about each region.

Representation

The complied pictures of the regions of people would be displayed visually in a museum-type setting. Because the interpretation of facial expressions and body language is different for each person, the project would aim at posing a question about the nature of an environment’s effects on a person’s attitude, rather than presenting hard data of how groups of people act and what that could mean. Thus, the project would hopefully create a “forceful point of view,” by leaving the findings of the data up to interpretation and not giving any kind of conclusion for the observer to understand.

Tufte claimed that in order for a display to be graphically excellent, it must “make large data sets coherent” and “encourage the eye to compare many pieces of data.” My project would take hundreds of visual data pieces and layer them one on top of another to create a dozen or so images that the observer can interpret, thus taking an unmanageable amount of information and arranging it visually so that the observer can understand the point of the project. It would also encourage comparison of the data, both in each region’s single display and among the displays of the different regions by showing the similarities and differences between different pieces of data.

The display would be reflective of Data Art, in the sense that it would be founded on the idea of displaying a collection of data points about how people tend to act based on location and displaying them in a visual way that allows for better understanding and interpretation by the observer. It is also similar to the idea behind the Pulse Room: to create an interpretive experience where the observer can feel like a part of the artwork. Whether the observer would feel connected to the visual displays by knowing that he or she is most likely in one of the pieces or because the observer feels connected to his or her region and the way that it is visually represented, my project would allow for the observer to interact with the pieces on a more intimate level.

Tufte claimed that good data art “should reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure.” My project would aim to do so by allowing the viewers to not only get a broad idea of what people from a specific region look like when interacting with strangers, but also view the finer details, such as how many people used big hand gestures, and how many smiled. Small details could be learned from focusing on the general fuzziness of the pieces at a finer level.