Dear Visual Diary
Medium: Acrylic
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Laser Cutter
Team: Mandy Chen, Van Nguyen, Robert Chavez
About
A four week group project focused on modular design. This is a visual, structural diary that records emotions using colors and icons to represent designated generalized feelings creating a visual representation of your life.
The pieces are colored coded to represent 4 general umbrellas of emotions: sadness, happiness, frustration and inner peace. Each emotion category has 5 designs to represent a scope of each emotion. For example, a red design can represent conventional indignation, distress or any other associated sentiment. The unique thing about using images instead of words is that people can connect their own meanings to each image rather than to a word which has a specific definition. This makes each structure unique to each person’s life. The Dear Visula Diary (DVD) is also a great device to help with self reflection. Users can use the data to make the adjustments and changes they want to see in their lives.
Research
Choosing the type and color of the plastic was important for usability. Western color association was utilized to favor specific tones for certain moods. As a team from a diverse background, we brainstormed keywords that we associated with certain colors. Using this data, we narrowed down four colors to represent four generalized feelings. From there, we made several visits to Tap Plastics in San Jose, CA to pick the most suitable colored and textured acrylic.
We decided to go for opaque acrylics which produced additive color mixing between the colors, producing colors not offered in the pieces, like green. This created more cohesion from piece to piece and emphasized the overall structure of the diary.
Testing
Test shapes with different sized notches designed in Adobe Illustrator. These shapes helped us understand how detailed we could print on the laser cutter, as well as what notch placements would be ideal to create a larger tessellated structure.
Some of the text cuts produced. They are all connected to see which notches are most secure.
After the test cuts, the notch size is finalized. These experiments also revealed the overall size the designs would need to fit into in order to produce enough pieces for a calendar month.
Final Pieces
Anger
Designed by Alyssa Castaneda
Similar to how humans get red in the face from increased blood flow when upset, red is the first color that comes to mind to represent anger, frustration, enmity and other related emotions.
Neutrality
Designed by Robert Chavez
Most days are uneventful and mundane. For chill days like these, clear pieces can be used as either default pieces, or to represent mellow days. Pictured 2/5 designs.
Happiness
Designed by Mandy Chen
For most people, yellow is a considered a bright and cheery color, associated with nature, the sun, and warmth—perfect to represent your good days. Pictured 2/5 designs.
Sadness
Designed by Van Nguyen
Feeling blue? Blue is generally used to represent the emotional umbrella of sadness, including grief, heartache, and hopelessness. Pictured 2/5 designs.
Video
A short video produced as a team explaining the project.
Successes of the Project
Overall, the general idea and theme of the project were extremely successful. I think using symbols and color to identify everyday emotions and to create a hands-on data visualization diary is a unique and fun idea. The idea is straightforward, and can have many viable applications to someone’s life, such as self-improvement, and mental health tracker. The designs themselves are very amusing and broad which help be curable to different people. I think also choosing acrylic as our medium was a great choice, because not only were the colors more vivid, but their semi-opaqueness create beautiful shadows that make the still object more active.
Future Improvements
Despite the overall success of the project, I can admit that there could be many improvements made in the future should we decide to continue this project in some way. I think for one, the color and design choices are fairly Western, so having different sets with different colors and designs representing the same emotions would be a great way to be inclusive of other cultures. Apart from this, another criticism would be design choices. I think to improve this, we could include more colors to have a wider range of possible emotions for different days. The same could be said about designs; if each emotion had 10 designs instead of 5 , the modularity and customization would be greater and better for the user. Something else to consider for the future, would be the size of the pieces. Though we found success with roughly 2”x2” pieces, it would be beneficial to experiment with much larger and smaller sizes.
