Autobiographical Game

Description

I am that kind of a person who NEVER leaves the phone alone. I always have my phone with me, any time and any where. I suppose it’s sort of a bad habit. I decided to track how I talk to other people. Is it through the phone? Social media? How many people do I talk with in person? Also, I decided to count the number of scam calls I get since I started to get A LOT of scam calls and messages after I came here.

Starting from the top right, the sections represent the dates, which is Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Press on the buttons below to see the data!

Link to Code

Design Process

I first started off with collecting my data. I honestly didn’t think about the design first. So I separated the categories to 4, which were online(meaning social media and chat), in person, phone calls and scam calls. Other data turned out as I thought, but it was interesting to see that I didn’t receive any scam calls or messages on the weekend.

I then thought of the design, and I came up with a round graph, showing different data sets when I push a button. I thought about animating them, too. In the middle, I was planning to add icons to show which data the user is looking at.

Using the array to insert data was not complicated. However, making the buttons work was not as easy as I thought. It may be because I didn’t know which keywords to search for, but I was stuck with making the buttons for a long time. I wish I have snapshots of all the attempts I had. I tried using createButton, mouseClick, and more, but for some reason they did not work. So I ended up using if to set up the range and to use mouseIsPressed so the ellipse could act as a button. I couldn’t animate my graph as I wished it to and the design is slightly off, but I was VERY happy that I figured out a way to make the buttons work.

Reflection

From this project, I learned that I started to communicate with more people online. It’s probably because now I’m in New York and most of my friends are in Korea or at other parts of America. Since I spent way too much time figuring out how to make buttons through p5js, I wasn’t able to add certain factors that would allow the users to easily read the data, like the week and numbers. Also, I think there might be a more efficient way to visualize this data, which looks more like a bar chart.