trash hyacinth

Data Portrait

Collecting data about one personal habit and creating a visualization.
I counted the waste I'm producing, categories being paper, plastic, metal, compost, and trash. Only counted waste that I directly produced or participated in producing.
→ link to code

Design Process

My two initial ideas were:

  1. number and type of dishes I wash each day; I'm the one that washes the dishes the most frequently and in the most timely manner out of my roommates
  2. number and type of waste I'm creating/throwing out each day; I'm rather meticulous about sorting trash and recycle and stuff

I thought I could just collect data for both and make a decision about which afterwards.
I collected two weeks of data for each, starting on Wednesday, November 24, 2021 and ending on Tuesday, December 07, 2021. I kept tallies on sticky notes for each category in each dataset, by day. For dishwashing, I counted plates, bowls, pots/pans, cups, utensils, and misc items. For waste I counted, paper, plastic, metal, compost, and trash items.

My idea for the dishwashing data was to have a stack of pots, pans, utensils, etc, for each day, the number and type of tems in each stack corresponding to the dishes I actually washed that day. My idea for the waste data was to have a shape for each type of trash, and the size/some parameter would be corresponding to the number that day; each day would get a unique composition made up of those shapes.
I think the dishwashing visualization would have been visually more interesting and clear but more complicated to code, so I just went with the waste data.

I put my data in a JSON file, an array of objects for each week, properties being the number of each item category in that day. The shapes being drawn on the canvas for each day are class objects with either a size parameter or petal/spoke number parameter taking the property value of the corresponding waste category from the JSON file. The shapes and colors being used are kind of related to their category, the background is my hyaBlue.
I ended up organizing everything concentrically for ease of code and standardization. I was hoping there might be some correlations, but I think I need to collect more to really tell.

Reflection

Collecting the data made me so much more conscious of producing and throwing away my trash. I noticed that I tend to throw away my roommates' trash that they leave out as well, so it might have been interesting to count all trash I throw away.
I might try to collect more data for both to see if there are any correlations, but it was somewhat exhausting to have to keep track of these actions. Since I collected all my data on those sticky notes, it was harder to rememebr to keep account of my trash when I'm outside. I also think I should have kept timestamps as well, perhaps there's some correlation happening there.

Credits

This project references the Dear Data project by Giogria Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.
Code from this example is used for the star shape and this example for the flower shape.