Review of Self Tracking Projects

Fitness and Health has been something I have been tracking about myself, through fitbit and food tracking apps like Livestrong. I have used it a long time ago and it has significantly changed my eating habits! Furthermore, I have pitched this idea in September of tapping into body hormones to increase happiness by tracking how many hugs I give or get in a day. This also sparked interest in many abstract categories that I thought would be a good challenge for myself. I was blown away by my discoveries:

1. Quant Creativity  http://measuredme.com/2013/05/my-attempt-at-tracking-creativity/
   • Description: Konstantine Augemberg of Measured Me developed methods to measure his creativity. He use the following parameters:
     • Elaboration: how elaborated and detailed the work was; (10-point sliding scale)
     • Novelty: if he worked on something new; (checkbox)
     • Originality: if it was original; (checkbox)
     • Solution: if he found a solution to a problem; (checkbox)
   • Why it is significant. For designers or enthusiasts, it is important to understand what best environment is good to inspire creativity.
   • PROS/CONS: The takeaway is that knowing what days and time creativity peaked doesn’t necessarily give supporting anecdotes to clue what may have contributed to his boost of creativity. I will use this to reference that a more qualitative approach eg sketching or writing a few sentences to describe what transpired during the day, can be helpful in adding more context to the data I will be tracking.
2. Rejection Therapy  100 Days of Rejection
   • Description: Jia Jiang’s goal was clear and simple: to desensitize oneself from the pain of rejection. For 100 days, he would immerse himself in interactions with people that will get him rejected. He used these criteria as parameters for his ideas: 1. Ethical (no lying or marriage-undermining) 2. Legal 3. Doesn’t defy the law of physics.
   • Why it is significant: Although this form of tracking is through journaling and not big on tracking quantitative data, I truly appreciate how the end goal of improving one’s mindset or embracing rejection can be powerful definition of progress than charting an upward slope in a graph.
   • PROS/CONS: The goal of the project is an end in itself. 100 days of Rejection promises something of a paradigm shift. The challenge is logistically challenging in terms of having to set up scenarios within a consistent timeframe.
3. Storyboarding the Psyche 
   • Description: Cliff Atkinson’s “Storyboarding the Psyche” helped him discover patterns of the unconscious self by noting the date, time, location, context of the day based on activities of the:
     • Brain Stem (body): What activity have I engaged in?
     • Limbic System (emotions): Feeling after interactions with positive or negative people?
     • Cognitive Capacity (mind): What was I thinking of at a particular time?
   • Why it is significant: I think this type of activity adds another layer of meaning to data collected through health and wellness apps like fitbit. It is important to contextualize the success of achieving 12,000 of steps and journaling interactions that also happened that day.
   • PROS/CONS: I plan on adapting Cliff’s method where he did quick sketches on the Penultimate app to tell how his day went. In digitizing this, I think visualizing common words through a word cloud would be a good way to track consistency in thought and feeling patterns.