Does trying new things, or doing anything that deviates from my established practices of habit, improve my wellness? Additionally, does the answer to the question, “How are you?” affect the number and duration of new activities? Do I gravitate towards planned or spontaneous new activities? I drew my inspiration for these questions from Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Dear Data project, specifically “week 43”.
I am the primary audience for my work, but I also anticipate interest from my family and friends, as well as people who would like to do activities that veer off from their typical schedules. I am a human who generally follows an unvarying routine, but daydreams about doing “out-of-the-ordinary” activities to improve my sense of fulfillment. This project self-servingly explores how trying new things affects the eight dimensions of my wellness (mental, physical, social, vocational, financial, spiritual, environmental, and intellectual). As a person who has social anxiety and dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder), I would like to discover which new activities I gravitate toward that provide fulfillment.
I collected data from Monday (March 27) to Friday (March 31) using a small notebook and pen. Originally, I tried to carry the notebook with me wherever I went, but my own limitation of forgetfulness prevented me from doing so. Thus, I wrote down some details from memory, which has been affected by a past concussion. I wrote the action I took that deviated from my normal routine, the location where it took place, the duration of time I took to complete the action, the time I finished the action, the emotions I felt, and which dimension/s of wellness this action belongs to. Also, I rated the level of difficulty of completing the action, and noted the qualitative reason behind the action’s difficulty. Additionally, I used a Likert scale to rate the following: “I strongly feel that this activity has improved the dimension of wellness it was categorized by.” and “This action has genuinely given me a sense of fulfillment.”
From the visualizations, approximately 73% of the new activities were completed at home, and the locations of the rest of the activities were split evenly between Bayside and Flushing. Additionally, it appears that my poor physical and mental health on Wednesday affected the duration and number of activities.
Kindly use the following link to my Public Tableau site for increased viewing quality: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/marilyn.moy
Across all the visualizations, I used the “Ink Free” font to convey a handwritten aesthetic. I chose to make a pie chart to show the distribution of the locations where the new activities happened. The tree map was made to show the distribution of dimensions of wellness. I used the tooltips to provide some textured details. One limitation of this project is not being able to make the Likert scale visualization with my collected data, due to not finding a suitable online tutorial with a similar dataset. I tried to add PNG icons into my tree map from The Noun Project, but I wasn’t able to able to find the icons I saved in the Repository folder.
Additionally, I was unsure of how to transfer the knowledge from Lab 7 to organize my dataset to make stacked bar charts across the weekdays. Another limitation is not making a visualization to convey which activities provided the highest rating of fulfillment. Also, I intentionally binned the activities into one dimensions of wellness each, even though some activities could fall under two or more. Finally, the last limitation I noted was not knowing how to make a story with several different data sources. I could not drag a sheet from one file to another file where I intended to make a story. Next steps would include making the aforementioned visualizations.
