I have been experimenting. Throughout the last year I’ve been playing around with presenting data as art, inspired by ‘Observe, Collect, Draw!’. Here is a sample of one effort. Warning: art is hard, as Cursive would say.
Showing the healing of time?
What you see is a representation of my quality of sleep over a traumatic 25 week period of my life. What I wanted to convey was that despite living through some difficult days, if you could see your experience in a wider lens, you might witness your pain existing in a new perspective. Wounds can heal and one won’t be restless forever.
How
For those interested in how the above was constructed then here goes…
I own and used a Withings Move to track sleep. It’s not an expensive piece of kit, so make of the data what you will. It has the function to track sleep and using the accompanying app you can see your sleep scored out of 100. This is based on…
- Duration (total time spent sleeping)
- Depth (part of night spent in deep sleep)
- Regularity (consistency between your bed- and rise-times)
- Interruptions (time spent awake)
This was used to present quality of sleep.
App
I used a sketches app to draw out the data. I wanted a minimalist aesthetic.
Explaining what you see
- the X axis signifies quality of sleep which the Withings Health Mate app communicates. I opted to split it into 25 weeks, using the average sleep tracking score.
- I then split those scores into 6 segments from worst to best and used colour to convey deep red being the worst to dark green being the best (low is 61% and high is 86%).
- the Y axis is a snapshot of time. At the top would be late September and the bottom mid-March.
- I did originally have the axis flipped which felt more like a graph. See those examples below.
- I chose to do this as aimed to narrate a story of a pain drifting away.
Alternative ways to represent the data
I had a few cracks at this (yes… this did take multiple hours to do & write up)…
Below is what it could also look like in actual graph form, I’ve added total sleep time (which is the total seconds of light and deep sleep then calculated into hours) and this data is on a daily level rather than an average weekly score.
There are probably more elegant ways to convey what I wanted to but I’m no artist.
Why do it at all?
I discovered a set of cataclysmic revelations regarding a former relationship, which then forced life into a long stretch of choppy waters. In the midst of this I became slightly obsessed with making sure I was as well as I could be… and tracking it. Having never worn a watch to sleep before, I began on night 1. I think I did it mostly knowing that one day, as some sort of culmination of the experience, I would be removed from that place and would get to reflect on having grown out of that nightmare. Equally, it could be a predilection to measure or see it as a messy, geeky form of distraction and therapy.
Did I do any more?
Yes, I’ve played around with a few of these (for example, a few months ago I pulled my spotify data to chart the most played tracks during this period of my life). In some ways they all feel a bit like writing out letters that one never sends. This one is now the exception. I doubt I will share more. 1 being published is enough. Content for more frivolous things to measure in the future.
Conclusion
Sleep is important. I’ve been reading ‘Why we sleep’ and it is full of interesting insights into the damage of not sleeping well. The author writes;
When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it is deficient, they don’t.
Well this blog post is all about flourishing and thus I’ve been trying some tweaks to my night time routine to improve sleep throughout 2021. Looking at the data… these modifications seem to be helping.
Final note
A fleeting motivation to publish something like this has been hovering on the horizon for a few months now but this post is the plunge in the deep end. I write this in the shadow of some incredibly brave women putting their well-being first on one of the grandest public stages. If they can do it then I should be able to muster the courage to publish on a blog that few will stumble on.