How do the two values inform eachother? High blood pressure = low fibre intake?
Blood Pressure Bread
Puppet iterations
After playing with statistics and statistical measurements using the mini easels, I had more of a play with the same materials (string glue, wood and easels) to try and discover new ways of making ‘puppets’ or rigs.
Fibre motion continued
- I made 2 more fibre puppets, lined them up and took a picture each time one of the puppets moved. I moved the furthest puppet away correlating to breakfast, then the middle puppet correlating to lunch then the closest puppet correlating to dinner.
- I then started to think about how the results could be shown differently. Taking the piece of paper i used to breakdown the fibre into breakfast lunch and dinner, I then decided to give each gram of fibre a different colour from 0-20g of fibre. I made it so that the darkest colours were of the lowest value (1-9) and the lightest colours the highest value (10-20).
- I then started to think about what I could do with these coloured numbers. The most obvious idea being to paint with them. So, using the very same sheet of numbers that were broken down in to breakfast lunch and dinner, I assembled a colour breakdown next to the numbers so B8-L3-D9 would be blue-purple-blue. I then took these colours and drew a third of a picture of a meal in response to these colours. I ended up with around 12 paintings of the same meal, each broken down into 3 different coloured values of fibre per page.
- When I put the animation together, I really liked the effect it had but I wanted it to look a little more cohesive so instead of drawing over a meal, I drew over an image of the stomach which I had broken down into 3 segments and painted accordingly.
- Again, I was really pleased with how this turned out but my goal now was to think about how to merge the motion of the puppet with the results of the number-colour outcome. My initial thoughts were to attach the utensils of the colour-number trial to the puppet. I drilled a hole through 2 crayons using a screwdriver and replaced the moving wooden easel fingers with it. The goal now is to get it to be able to draw onto something as it moves so you are left with a record of colour according to how much fibre you’ve eaten in one day.
Fibre Motion
After the Work In Progress, I really wanted to make something that was puppet like. I had the idea of making a puppet that was attached to your hand that had 5 different elements (maybe carbs, fibre etc) and when your fingers moved up and down a table of values (maybe 0-20) they would move accordingly and be the visualisation of the intake of these nutritional values.
I bought some wood glue and string from the hardware store then moved to poundland for any inspiration before I went home and tried to bring the sketch to life. Amazingly, I came across these tiny wooden moving parts that were meant to be used as mini easels. I completely had my work cut out for me as they moved so elegantly. I bought four for £2 – what a bargain.
Before I knew what the puppet would be representing, I just started to make it. I stuck all 4 easels next to eachother then stuck that to a plank of wood I had. I then played about with the string. I wanted to make it so that if you pulled/pushed one element of it, another element of it would move but I also wanted it to be moved without the hand being attached to it all the time so it had to hold itself, this is when I added the pins. I ended up with two moving elements so I then marked off on the wood it was attached to; a 1 cm increment that ran 20 cm from base. Here it is…
To put it to the test and to see what information it could give me; I took fibre as a value (merely because I had kept a record of all of the fibre I had consumed from the previous 12 days.)
I then marked off the measurements from 0-42 and made the furthest moving element the NRV for fibre in one day (30g). So I attached the pin to the 30cm mark then took a photo each time I moved the nearest moving element to represent one day’s worth of fibre. Here is what I ended up with…
As a moving object that displayed the intake of fibre over a 12 day period vs the recommended daily intake of fibre, this ‘puppet’ worked. It was now a question of what else could be done with its data.
I then started to map where the puppet had moved so I would be able to track its movements. This was the most simple way I could think to map the movements.
I then made 2 other puppets. My next task will be to track and record other data and see what outcomes I can gain from this moving object.
Video references
Covert Overt
Working with nutrition statistics still, I wanted to look at how to unpack the nutritional information of one meal. This was the unpacking of a pasta dish that included only 6 ingredients yet it unveiled a whole heap of information and values. The video is meant to be a sort of ‘behind the scenes’ video where you can hear all the different elements of each ingredient while on screen, different animations / ways of displaying data are visualised. All in all, the video unveils the complexities behind trying to work out the nutritional information in one meal and how hard this is to visualise.
Some of the methods of collecting and displaying data includes simple graphs on computer as well as the living breathing body, paper ‘flip book’ type animation, stop motion animation that shows the NRV vs the actual intake, and recording data on the body.
These ways of animating were meant to be a rapid response to data collection. Now that I have done this in quite a home-made, slapdash way, i’d like to focus on making a sophisticated means to revealing the movements of the body using inspiration from puppets and animatronics.
Interview with Emma
Your name, your occupation, and for how long you’ve been a diabetic?
My name is Emma, I am currently training to be a health coach and have been diabetic for 18 years now.
When were you told you had diabetes and what was that experience like?
I can’t actually remember my diagnosis since I was so young. However I remember my parents saying they had a hard time diagnosing me. I was rapidly losing weight, constantly thirsty and experiencing a few other symptoms after I had just had been ill with a virus. My parents took me to the doctor who said nothing was wrong with me but they stuck to their instincts and took me straight to the hospital where the doctor there did one finger prick and diagnosed me straight away with type 1!
What assistance / information / technology were you given for your diabetes?
Since being diagnosed I’ve been regularly seeing my diabetes team at my local hospital. I usually go every 3 months. I normally see my doctor who goes through all my blood sugar readings and we discuss what insulin changes I should make and sometimes I see a dietician who helps me with carb counting and staying healthy. This has been where I’ve got most of my assistance and information to do with diabetes until recently when I joined the diabetic community on Instagram. This is where I get a lot of my information now. I was on daily injections till that age of 8 when I changed to a medtronic pump. I stayed with the wired pump till age 14 where I changed to a non-wired pump, the Omnipod which I am still on now.
When you were told you had diabetes, did you know what it was / did you know anybody else with diabetes?
I had no idea what it was being so young. No one in my family had it and we knew no other people the same age that had it. I think back then it was unusual to have it so young so it was a bit of a shock to everyone.
Did you tell people you had it? Do you tell people now that you have it or is it something you keep hidden?
My parents told my teachers and would always tell people who were looking after me if we ever went anywhere because it was important they knew to look out for me. I do tell people now if it comes up in conversation. I spent most of my teenage years hiding it because I was so worried about being ‘different’ but I’ve slowly got more confident with it.
What are the main struggles of living with diabetes? And what part does the technology play in this?
For me the main struggles are that it’s non-stop. I struggled growing up trying to keep my sugars down and never being able to have a day off. I also think growing up being diabetic I found my other main struggle to be accepting it! I always thought it would be cured or I could ‘deal with it tomorrow’. I hated being different from my friends and having so much more to think about over such every day things, such as eating food. This definitely affected my control for a number of years because I just tried to forget about it. My technology played a part in this when I was growing up as I found having to prick my fingers to test my blood sugar and wear a wired pump that wasn’t easily hidden like it was drawing attention to myself and inviting people to ask questions, which, I hated. As technology has developed and I am now on a non-wired pump and can scan my phone on my arm to test my to test my sugars it’s much easier to be discreet and I can keep it private if I want to. Technology has also made it easier to look after myself because I don’t feel it’s such an effort to test my blood sugar using my sensor now compared to testing my sugars with a finger prick. I see it now less of a chore and more of an option which is very big for me after years of diabetes burnout.
If you could design your own diabetes technology, what would it look like? (This answer could be drawn or described.)
I would design a pump and test kit that is connected to a phone app. I would want it the size of the free style libre sensor on my body which can be worn anywhere and you scan it for your blood sugar then if it is too high or low it will automatically correct your sugars via the app.
National Reference Value
Following on from the ‘day in the life’ animation, I started to look at what I was eating as a form of data and how close to the ‘national reference value’ of each nutritional element I was. Having never counted a calorie, a gram of protein or a gram of fibre, this was all completely new.
I wrote everything I ate for 3 days down and worked out exactly how much I was consuming of the following:
Calories, Protein, Carbohydrates, Sugar, Fat & Fibre.
I then imported the final graphs that represented how close i was to the NRV into adobe animate and lined up the NRV so that my data was almost doing a dance around it, getting closer or further away from the suggested amount.
The thing to note here is that you sort of lose the ‘health’ side of it when its being animated like this. When it was data in word, it was a series of numbers and fluctuations of nutrition, some stats being worse than others. Of course, it’s better to be eating less sugar and more fibre for example, so I could see on the graph where i was doing ‘well’ and where I wasn’t. but when it’s displayed as a dance where the NRV is always in the same position, you lose the sense of whether its a good thing or a bad thing that its higher / lower the NRV.
Contrasting this with diabetes and blood sugar levels, if the levels are too high or low, something must be done about it. And of course these always fluctuate depending on what you eat / what activity you’re doing, and getting it close to the line is, I suppose, a good thing as you know you’re on target but as long as you keep track of the levels, it’s all fine.
The last animation (far right) doesn’t really work as a set of data because its not being displayed in a functional way. It goes back and forth between different sets of data and it doesn’t show the data moving along a chronological 3-day time frame. It goes from day 1 to day 3 in one nutritional value then day 3 to day 1 in another and so on. It does however, leave you with a pattern that shows you how far from the NRV you are, the closer you are to it, the more on track you are.
What I like most about this animation is the fact that you can see this data moving. Graphs don’t really work in the same way, they are informative but they are static. Because this looks like a dance, I now have the urge to choreograph it, what will it look like over 6 days or 3 weeks? It’s taken on a life of its own and each line represents an inner-body fluctuation that has taken on a life of its own, but a life that I can now control.
Interview with Lara
Your name, your occupation, and for how long you’ve been a diabetic?
Hello, my name is Lara, I’m a Law student in Paris. I was diagnosed in February 2016, so 5 years ago .
When were you told you had diabetes and what was that experience like?
When I first learned that I was diabetic, I didn’t accept it at all. I told everyone they were wrong, and that I was perfectly healthy. Later that day, I saw the machine my mom gave me to check my blood sugar and started to cry… I refused for a quite long time to do my insulin injections (even though I knew it was not reasonable haha). Today I can say I needed 2 years to completely accept it and to understand how to live with it !
What assistance / information / technology were you given for your diabetes?
For the first week after my diagnosis, the doctor tried to prescribe only 2 shots a day (one half slow half fast and one fast insulin shot). But we saw it didn’t and couldn’t work… so I had to inject the slow one every night before going to sleep and the fast one before every meal. I also had with me the machine to test my blood sugar level.
When you were told you had diabetes, did you know what it was / did you know anybody else with diabetes?
I knew what diabetes was, because my little cousin and my grandmother also have type 1. But I couldn’t identify myself to them.
Did you tell people you had it? Do you tell people now that you have it or is it something you keep hidden?
My family knew directly I had diabetes. Then I told my friends and professors at school.
Now I don’t tell people anymore. I don’t hide it, but I don’t talk about it. It became something so normal to me that I sometimes forget I have it and don’t feel like I need people to know.
What are the main struggles of living with diabetes? And what part does the technology play in this?
Of course living with diabetes is full of ups and downs. I struggle the most when I am under pressure or stress. It makes my blood sugar increase, but when it’s high I cannot focus on what I have to do so I stress even more ! It’s a circle. So I’ve learned to stress a lot less.
Also, there are some phenomenon impossible to explain and it can be really frustrating…
Everything got better when I put the freestyle libre (a device that allows me to check my blood sugar with my phone or with a small machine, without pricking my finger) and the insulin pump !
The last one is clearly s life changer 👌🏻 I don’t have to inject Insulin myself with needle, I just program it on a device which I change every 3 days.
If you could design your own diabetes technology, what would it look like?
Well I think science has almost achieve to design the technology I wish we had !
A combination of the sensor (freestyle libre) and the insulin pump that regulates itself according to the variation of the blood sugar.
That would just like wearing a pancreas, and it would be amazing !!
Day in the life pt II
I ended up recording my movements, the time, and the songs I was listening to.
I then took these results one step further by trying to animate them as a 24hr fluctuation in time, movement and genre of music. Time was pretty straightforward, it would be 24 hrs which could be converted into 24 x 60 frame seconds so that 1 second would = 1 hour. To show my movements I made a series of spheres, the smallest sphere representing my desk, the largest sphere representing areas outside of deptford.
To show what music I was listening to, I thought it would be easiest to show the genre of music I was listening to. So I allocated different colour circles to a different genre… (Damien Hirst rip off here)
I then had to find out how long each song was, what genre it is then add this to adobe animate.
E.g. Funnel of Love by Wanda Jackson = Country = 2 mins (round up / down accordingly). This info was then transferred to adobe animate.
^ So at frame 70 (1 hour and 10 mins = 11:10am), this genre plays for 2 frames representing the 2 minutes of country I listened to at 11:10am.
Here’s the final animation…
Design Year 3 