Project 6 Data Portrait

Description

I’m a nail-biter, or psychologist may say I have onychophagia. Before you google onychophagia, I must warn you that you probably are going to see pictures that make you very uncomfortable. To be short, people who have onychophagia usually bit their nails when they feel negative emotions like anxiety. The pictures you will see under this word are not appealing. I have had this habit when I was in kindergarten. This habit becomes less intense as I grow up.

I bit my nails a lot when the final is coming. It’s still something I can’t control. The treatment of this bad habit, as some psychologists said, is to remove the source of anxiety. However, it’s impossible in my case. My pressure comes from almost everywhere. Sometimes missing the bus I’m waiting for will make me start to bit my nails. The good thing is I’m willing to face this problem recently. When I see the instruction for this project, I want to take this project as a chance to understand more about myself.

Design Process

I bit my nails a lot when the final is coming. It’s still something I can’t control. The treatment of this bad habit, as some psychologists said, is to remove the source of anxiety. However, it’s impossible in my case. My pressure comes from almost everywhere. Sometimes missing the bus I’m waiting for will make me start to bit my nails. The good thing is I’m willing to face this problem recently. When I see the instruction for this project, I want to take this project as a chance to understand more about myself.

Interesting things happened on my first day of documentation. I realized I was biting my nails when I was reading an article. I know I felt a little anxious because I wanted to finish the reading before sleep. However, I kept bitting after I was fully immersed in that article. I realized I was biting nails, not because of anxiety but some kind of excitement! Similar things also happened when I trying to develop my Major Studio final project or when I was looking at someone’s artwork that I think is brilliant. To differentiate two emotions, I wrote down “a” for anxiety and “e” for excitement. One “a” means one time of feeling anxiety, and an “e” for one time of feeling excitement.

When designing the look of that data portrait, I try to separate these two emotions on their look. They are symbolized by different shapes and colors. People who are looking at my data portrait can also choose to look at how only one emotion is scattered. I chose light or cute color palette for this portrait because I’m happy about the fact that the trigger of this habit is not all negative.

Reflection

1.I’m happy to find out that the sources of my bad habits are not all negatives. In many cases, the thought that I can’t handle big pressure as others can hurt me more than the bad habit itself. By the way, to understand this bad habit I did a little research before documentation. One article said, there are about 50% in my generation have onychophagia. Knowing this also makes me feel better.

It’s hard to also show the duration time of each nail-biting in this portrait, but it can be meaningful data too. And it’s also very hard to document the duration. After my attention is translated to documentation, I wouldn’t go back to nail-biting. I never know normally how long I bit my nails. Moreover, this visualization can’t present what makes me feel anxious or excitement, and what I was doing when I feel those feelings.

I think shows very clearly how many times I bit my nails in the past week. It also shows that not all onychophagia is triggered by negative feelings.