Drawing Feelings
Organization: NYU ITP
Category: Website
URL: Drawing Feelings
Team: Myself
Role: UX Research, Design & Implementation of the visualization and website, user testing.
Date: May 2017
Background
'Drawing Feelings' is a data visualization website that tells the story of my every day feelings through daily drawings of objects that represent my feelings. This was my thesis project at NYU ITP.
Research
I started my research by doing an anonymous survey and 80 people responded. I asked them how much are they in doubt when creating something. Most of the people did feel in doubt and chose the middle response, value 3 or 4. On purpose I didn’t leave a middle 3.5 so people can’t chose the middle point.
Anonymous survey vs. public tweets
In the anonymous survey I asked people if they ever feel in doubt and if so, in which situation. Turns out, people feel doubt in all their major aspects of life: taxes, medical bills, if God is real, to get married or not, about calling themselves an artist or if their art is worthy. So I decided to take a closer look at the artists' doubt about one's art. So I pulled out tweets that use the word "doubt" and compared the results with the survey I took. Tweets were all “I never doubt myself, I always trust myself”. It was clear to me that we live in two different worlds: The Outside World (social platforms) where we act and feel based on the society's norms and an Inside World (anonymous survey) where we hide how we feel from the world.
How can you draw feelings?
Then I decided to look closely into my own feelings to reinforce my findings about Inside and Outside Worlds and to do so, I set up drawing rules. But then I asked myself how can one draw feelings? This was the starting point for this project.
Daily Drawings for 30 days
For the next 30 days I drew my ‘feelings as objects in the Inside and Outside Worlds.
My Own Drawings
Here are all my 30 drawings that I did from February 19th - March 18th 2017.
I invited people to draw their feelings as objects in the World Outside and Inside and here is what they drew.
People’s Drawings
Creating an API
I entered my feelings every day in a database and created an API. Using this API I created a visualization.
CSS Animation
I traced my drawings in Illustrator and animated some of the objects in the drawings.
Illustration
"Drawing Feelings" is a personal journey of finding my inside and outside worlds through daily drawings of objects that represent my feelings. World Inside represents how we feel in society and World Inside represents how we really feel and what we hide from the world. The story begins on Feb 19th and ends on March 20th 2017. This was my thesis project at NYU ITP.
Data Visualization
Using this data, I made a visualization. The visualization I chose to make is a comparison of my Outside and Inside Worlds.
Website
NYU ITP Thesis
I presented ‘Drawing Feelings’ in 2017 at NYU ITP as my thesis to a live audience.
Takeaways
There are always two worlds inside us: what we show to the world and what we don’t show. Make your worlds meet in the middle. “I hope that you combine that edgy mixture of self-confidence and doubt. I hope that you have enough self-confidence to try new things and enough self-doubt to question”. Red Burns, Founder of NYU ITP.