Making It Real

In Marjorie Williams’ children’s book, “The Velveteen Rabbit,” a stuffed hare is taught by its fellow toy creatures that it will be become “real” if it is played with, dirtied, and loved by its owner. I feel this is what happens with data visualization. If there is one thing I learned from this project (although there are many), it’s that parsing and sifting through data can happen over and over again. It’s possible to learn something new every time, especially with the data being my own complex thoughts. It was even hard to stop running through it again and again to try to create more insightful categories, but I finally capped it.

It took some more time to “code” the data to make it easier to read, but it helped set the parameters to create the visual:

I mapped this out into some sketches and translated my data into the work to make the creation of the visual easy to follow.

I decided to represent all of the thoughts I recorded. It was important for me to show the persistent fixed mindset self-talk (represented by the grey squares), and the minimal green, organic shapes as growth mindset thoughts. Themes of comparison and mind reading were particularly prevalent, seen in the squares with additional cuts in the fabric and re-sewn. The words I used most frequently are sewn through each applicable thought and represented by different colors. When choosing colors for these thread, I looked up colors associated with the words and then chose their complimentary opposite. For example, blue is often used to show intelligence, so I chose orange for my thoughts that had the words stupid, dumb, not smart, etc. I used a different shade of orange to show immaturity. While sewing with these two colors, it was interesting to see their relation, often so real not just in the visual, but also in my thoughts.

I found it very helpful in understand data visualization through attempting to represent it clearly by “getting my hands dirty” in my own data and creating a tactile version. To me, nothing is more real.