Data Portraits Sketches II:
Sensing People in Time

Last Update: April 2006

  
 

Sketch 3 (Personality of Time):

Current implementation is conceived as a four panel interface for an alternative time keeping application. I use accelerometers and a Nokia 6600 to get different resolutions of location data. The system lets you keep track of your schedule like a calendar, search for the activities you do, look for the places you've been and compare different times of your life with each other.

The input to the system is both via self-reporting(e.g., annotation) or data logging. The information is stored in a MySQL database and visualized in the panels for different purposes.



I see this as a sketch for the future of time keeping that will let us go beyond the traditional regime of clocks and calendars.

I hope to see how different frequencies of events influence our behavior and if a system like this can create better awareness in making the desired use of our time.

  
Sketch 2 (Sensing in Time):

We study different methods to depict the ways people are spending their time in their lived environments. We look at people's relationships with each other in physical space through a variety of visualization techniques. By combining different sources of data from sensors, mobile phone logs and other social media, we build rich and meaningful histories from the less recognizable details of our lives to understand more on how our identities are shaped in time.

Keywords:

- Non-optical images
- Data Blogging (Social value of data)
- Long vs. Short Exposure of Selves in Time
- Snapshots of Data
- Portraits of Situations
- Semantic and Relational Sensing
- Memory Prostheses 		We design both the visualizations and the systems that provide us the information about people. We explore different metaphors for building new "cameras" from sensors (e.g. microphones, accelerometers) that capture the non-visual traces of our lives. The data collected by these cameras are tagged and annotated both automatically and in person, letting us to investigate the potential of a symbiotic intelligence in recording, analyzing and presenting rich depictions of our lives.

Subjects of Interest:

- Social Proximity in Time (The proxemic and distemic relationships of people and spaces)
- Social Gestures (Tempo-spatial analysis of time based social gestures)
- Individual Patterns (How much of time is spent inside/ outside/ alone/ people... etc.)
- Relations between Sequential Actions (Histories vs. Accumulations)
- Time Personalities (Lives caught between subjective and objective time)
- Time and its Coordination (Imposed Timing vs. Free Time)
- Time and its Mediation (Signaling Time)
- Time and Lived Space (Timeless spaces vs. city as a medium through which we make our way by spending time- Lynch)





 
   
Sketch 1 (Temporal Insights):

This is a first attempt to visualize the distribution of location based activity based on a weekly data log filled with different users. The results are not that interesting. They don't capture much about the dynamism of daily rhythms. The boundaries are too dicreet and they force each activity to belong to a particular category.
 Besides, although we are using objective temporal grids (e.g. week, month, day) to coordinate our time with other people, most of the interesting activity happens during our subjective experience of time, which demands fluid boundaries than rigid temporal stamps such as Saturday 3 o'clock. Time in the objective domain helps for synchronizing social time, but the resolution of this framework is not enough to understand how people negotiate their lives within it.