Mother London | SFTW | The Data in Our Lives Issue

The Data in Our Lives Issue

03.05.2012

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Editor

By Miriam Rayman & David Thomas, from The Monkey House

Spurred on by the stand-up show of comedian Alex Horne, this week Miriam and David give us an insight into our growing love for self-quantifying the data in our lives. We find out that ‘we spend 12 months of our lives looking for lost things’; get a lesson on the tools that help us become fitter and happier through data; learn all about Nicholas Felton’s Data Biography; and even find out why 2005 wasn’t a good year for calling your new born Jude.

Seven years in the bathroom

Three months ago The Monkey House found themselves at the latest stand-up show from comedian Alex Horne. Called ‘Seven Years in the Bathroom’, our outing was part of research we were doing into a growing trend for self-quantifying the data in our lives evidenced by the continued growth in numbers flocking to data logging sites to catalogue the minutiae of their daily lives.

While zooming in on these tiny details can be pretty dull – who really cares if you walked 500 steps yesterday – Alex has turned such facts into a one-man show that recreate one’s life proportionally in an hour – it’s both amusing and disturbing. As soon as he read the statistic that the average man will spend a total of seven years in the bathroom, his little comedy antennas pricked up. ‘I went away, dug around for a few months and eventually managed to piece together what exactly we do in an average life,’ said Horne.

We spoke to him about some of the stats and facts that influenced his show:

What were the most staggering facts you came across when researching your show?

Well, there are plenty of ones like "eight months opening jars" and "twelve months looking for lost things" but I still find the "24 years asleep" one the most startling. We spend a third of our lives lying down with our eyes shut. This seems to me like a waste. I very much hope there are people out there looking for the cure for sleepiness.

Is it sad how much time we spend in the bathroom? Or the other dreary, crap parts of life?

We are, of course, slaves to everyday things. That is life. I'm a big fan of what others might see as dreary crap. I love a good bath. I even quite like opening jars. Yes, this clumped data shows that we should probably make more time for genuinely fun things, but it also shows that our lives our pretty comfy right now: tea, television and bed isn't too bad a combination.

How has researching the show affected your life?

The big one for me is housework. We spend four years doing housework - that, for me, is not a good use of time. So I don't do it any

more. Suddenly I've got four years free (to wallow in my mess). Also, I now take a jar with me whenever I think I might be queuing, in order to free up more time later on.

And finally, what advice can you give us to manage life better once it’s been broken down in such a way?

Hire a cleaner, walk more and try not to spend too much of your life analysing your life.

If you missed Alex’s ‘Seven Years in the Bathroom’ show the first time around, he’ll be doing it again on May 13th at the Brighton Fringe.

Wrist-bands, head-bands and lots of data

While Alex’s show puts a comedic spin on the data of everyday life, the fact is, the growing need to self-quantifying your life has become serious business, thanks to the growth in specialist instruments that help track and record life in minutiae detail.

From distance travelled, calories burned, tasks completed – not only are ‘the info-porn set’, as we like to call them, spending the time logging and tracking such behaviours, they’re also often sharing these stats with friends for ‘Gamificiation’, earning both ‘data bragging rights’ and self-satisfaction.

The mainstream growth of self-quantifying our lives is down to the availability of specialist tools and the growth of communities of like-minded data geeks. And what has become apparent in our travels into this world, is that most of it comes down to data that helps improve our lives and make us better people.

Lets explore five of our favourites:

1. Up by Jawbone
Up is a colourful bracelet with multiple functions. Synching to your iPhone and a special app, it tracks movement, reminding sedentary wearers to move with a gentle buzz once in a while. So if you’ve been at your desk for 8 hours, Up will remind you to get up and go for a walk. It even monitors sleep patterns, with an alarm clock and diagnostics on when you are waking. It counts calories too.

2. Nike+ Fuelband
“An endless parade of information”, the Fuelband, follows on the success of the original data tracker enjoyed by runners, Nike+. Opening up the monitoring of data to all sportsmen and women, it monitors all exercise and translates your activity into Nike Fuel. In essence, it brands your sweat. Throughout the day its light turns from red to green, so you know you’ve hit your exercise goal. It’s also a wristwatch too.

3. Withings
A Quantifying suite including weighing scale, blood pressure monitor, and baby monitor for the whole family. The scale shows your weight, fat mass and lean mass, and users

typically share data with doctors or personal trainers, keeping their health and diet on track.

4. Daytum
Daytum, by graphic designer Nicholas Felton (more on him in a sec) and interactive designer Ryan Case, lets you “collect, categorise and communicate your everyday data” to create an ongoing report. Daytum user profiles are a collection of aesthetically presented facts, mostly relating to distance, consumption or purchases.

5. Zeo
Zeo is a sleep-monitoring gadget: a goofy headband that monitors your sleep in detail. It will account for your REM sleep in hours and wake you at the optimal stage in your sleep cycle. All its data can, as with most quantifying tech, be synched with smartphones. Sleepy!

The data biography

In the quest for a better, happier and healthier life through data, it’s easy to just get caught up in the obsessive collection of said data. Instead, the most important thing, of course, its output – what it tells us, what we can learn, what stories it reveals. And it’s not just about bar charts; complex and beautiful data visualisation is today’s preferred method to tell our life stories. It’s this bit that we at The Monkey House love the best.At the forefront of data visualisation is whiz Nicholas Felton (He’s behind Daytum). ‘It’s my favourite way of telling stories. It involves taking things that are invisible or too large to comprehend, and then making them visible’ he says. If you’re a fan of magazines that have the data bug too, there’s a high chance that you’ve seen his work. His Rare Earth map for Fast Company is beautiful, as is his WikiPedia at Ten diagram for Wired magazine.

But setting him apart, and tied closer to self-quantifying personal data, is his annual Feltron Report. Running since 2005, the Report is his personal data biography,made up of maps and graphs that reflect the year’s activities. The whole book is beautifully designed. It’s a wet dream for any data enthusiast or aspiring graphic designer.

We’ve dug out a couple of our favourite stats, or micro-stories, from his 2010/11 biannual report:

Places Visited – 664; 40 different cities, 8 US states, 5 countries

Alcoholic Beverages – 899; 55% of all beverages excluding water

First Song of Year – ‘Everything in its right place’ from the album Kid A by Radiohead

Days Spent with Mom – 24 ¾ days, in 138 encounters

Total Hours Spent at Work – 2,567 ½; approximately 49 hours a week

Total Hours Spent at Work – 2,567 ½; approximately 49 hours a week

While clearly at the extreme and obsessive end of the spectrum, anyone who’s on Facebook has recently made a step into Felton’s world. He’s on the product team at Facebook, and the recent launch of the Facebook Timeline, has his influence all over it. With every ‘Like’, status update, Nike+ run upload, song played in Spotify, photo upload to the Facebook Timeline, we’re visualising the complex data of our lives to create our very own personal backstory.

The baby name voyager

While Felton’s beautifully designed info-diagrams create narratives, you could argue that unless you’re Felton and you want to cut down on the amount of times you, say, drink coffee, his Report is sort of useless for the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean that data tracking on the whole can’t be useful and serve a purpose – it can help us make decisions, point to ways we should do things or not do things.

On our journey into self-quantifying data, we’ve discovered that it’s most useful when

a number of data sets are cross-tabbed to reveal information that would not normally be visible.

So what could just be data that tells you how many cups of coffee you drink, when set against data that shows how productive you are, very quickly enables you to calculate the optimum amount of coffee you should drink to be productive.

One of The Monkey House’s most useful data discoveries helped us inform what to call our recent baby. Anna Powell-Smith’s Baby Name Voyager is an app that lets you see trends in names over the last 15 years.

The data is so complex that you can chart the rise and fall of children’s names, and even see how celebrity-culture effects what we call

our children. Speaking about the row between celebs Sienna Miller and ex-husband Jude Law,

creator Powell-Smith explains ‘ …when Jude was exposed as a ‘Cheating Love Rat,’ in 2005 – the popularity of his name dipped sharply, but hers continued to rise.’

Britain by mass observation

With the recent rise in hi-tech paraphernalia to accumulate lots of personal data - chips in our trainers, bands our arms, always-connected mobile devices all traced and tracked automatically online – you would be forgiven for thinking that the pursuit of data self-quantifying is a recently new thing.

But, actually you’d be wrong. Back in the 1930s, the Mass Observation Movement had a similar kind of goal. Led by a crew of British eccentrics – Charles Madge, a poet and journalist; Humphrey Jennings a surrealist painter and Tom Harrison a renegade anthropologist – the goal for the Mass Observation Movement was ‘to create an anthropology of ourselves by studying ordinary everyday people’.

Over several years, until the movement fizzled out towards the late 50s, groups of people were recruited to keep one-day diaries, which Mass-Observation called “day-surveys.” They were designed “to collect a mass of data without any selective principle,” and the experiment was repeated monthly. Co-creator Humphrey Jennings’s day survey includes such details as:

He and his wife putting on each other’s dressing gowns; the fact that there is sand in the bathtub because their daughter played in sand the day before; and, the bath mat is “untidy” but Jennings decides not to do anything about it.

While this information may seem trivial on the surface, once put into a historical context it becomes as riveting as Feltron’s report in that it tells us about life back then in rich, minutiae detail . It’s almost a potted history – they’re as good as the status updates and tweets that frequent our lives today. It’s just a

shame they didn’t quite push into the world of data visualisation – we’re sure their data could have been beautiful too.

About the Author

The Monkey House was founded by Arno Devo and Miriam Rayman to create words and images with a future-focused feel. Their offices are in East London although their catchment area is much broader. Recent projects include ‘Beauties,’ an ethnographic book on Chinese attitudes to beauty and “Imaging the Future,” a series of insight workshops on life in 2025.

Credits

Lead Image. Nicholas Felton; Story 1. Images courtesy of Alex Horne; Story 2. Of Nike+ Fuelband; Story 3. All by Nicholas Felton; Story 4. Via Baby Name Voyager; Story 5. Image of Britain by Mass Observation from Penguin Books