Recounter is a desktop app that transforms self-tracking data into artworks.
This project is my Design + Multimedia master's dissertation, supervised by P. Machado and E. Nunes. You can read more about it here and here.
Each visualization has a similar foundation which portrays passive data (i.e., background information gathered by the phone’s sensors). This information includes: localization, weather, noise, steps, photos, battery and internet connection.
So, by comparison methods, when we analyse someone else’s artwork, we are able to understand that the person in question walked more or less in a certain day of the month, or that a certain day was colder or warmer than other, for example.
The visualizations become more complex and personal as the active data is mapped, i.e., non-standard data, gathered through questions. This questions are set by the user and are asked several times a day — e.g. “how many coffees did you drink today?”, “who are you with right now?”.
All this information is represented through a system of symbols. Each type of possible answer (token, yes/no, multiple choice, person or number) has a specific graphic representation.
Thanks to the combination of standard and non-standard data, it is easy to recognize when 2 different artworks belong to 2 different people.
The following pictures show 4 different artworks from 4 different people.
This project resulted in an application built with Processing that receives JSON files exported from Nicholas Felton's Reporter App. With this application we generated artworks that were posteriorly printed into a set of postcards and a booklet.
