Author: ashwang

Draw My Life – Johnice

By Ashley Wang, Nikita Waghani, and Lisa Wu

Data sources: Food for Free dataset, 2013 Annual Report

Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8ab0z24hu3736b/Draw%20My%20Life.mp4?dl=0

The data say that the Food For Free program’s Home Delivery service serves 95 homebound Cambridge individuals in the year 2015, delivering fresh fruits and vegetables. One of these individuals, Johnice, relates how an accident forced him into an early retirement and made it difficult to carry groceries, putting him in a position of “food insecurity”. We wanted to tell this story because Johnice’s story resonated with us and really showed us how much of a positive impact this program had on people.

Our audience is the elderly and disabled Cambridge seniors who may want to learn more about Food for Free and their Home Delivery service. Our goals are to encourage these individuals to overcome the stigma of asking for help, and apply for the Food For Free program. Our original intent was to create a radio piece out of his story. Since our target audience isn’t extremely internet-savvy, we thought that this would be the best way to reach them. However, research shows that Facebook is also extremely popular for the over-50 demographic, and we decided to make a shareable video as well.

The result is a Draw-My-Life style video. This style of video was an extremely popular fad in 2013. In this type of video, the narrator talks about an event in their life, or their entire life, set to a fast-motion video of the author drawing illustrations on a whiteboard of key figures and events. We envision this video as part of a series of videos shared from the Food for Free Facebook page. For future work, we would draw stories from the 2013 Status Report, and improve the quality of the Draw-My-Life videos.

Data Log 2/15 (ashwang)

  • 12:00 AM – Watching the Netflix show ‘Freaks and Geeks’ – my stopping point is saved, and Netflix records my ‘TV show preferences’.
  • 10:00 AM – iPhone
    • iPhone Alarm app saves my settings for a wakeup alarm, keeps track of how many times I snoozed.
    • iPhone Health app keeps track of how many steps I’ve taken, flights climbed, and whether I was running or biking.
  • 10:20 AM – Facebook, Gmail, etc
    • Facebook messenger tracks my conversation history, which messages I haven’t read/seen yet, etc.
    • Gmail’s Inbox app also tracks which messages I haven’t read yet, which ones I’ve started to respond to but haven’t sent yet (as drafts), and which ones I’ve labeled as ‘pinned’ or ‘later’.
  • 11:00 AM – Package addressed to me arrived at the New House desk. Its location was stored, an automated e-mail was sent out.
  • 1:00 PM – 6.813 Lecture
    • nanoquiz results submitted using Google Forms
    • Their Stellar site logs the last time I visited the site, as well as my answers to the reading questions.
    • Microsoft OneNote records notes I’ve taken throughout class
  • 3:00 PM – 18.065 Office Hours
    • WolframAlpha stores my last few searches
    • Gradescope records the pictures/pdfs I upload and when I upload them.
  • 5:00 PM – swiping into Dorm using MIT ID
    • Security camera captures image of me going in through the door
  • 7:00 PM – added myself to German House late plate list online
  • 11:00 PM – Used Hubway key in at the closest Hubway stop to check out a bike. The # bikes, # docks information changes on apps like Bos Bikes, and Hubway keeps track of my biking time.
  • 11:30 PM – Used Credit Card at Shaws to buy food.

Space Exploration in our Solar System

Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/this-glorious-map-helps-you-keep-track-of-every-space-mission-in-the-solar-system

I really like science posters, but this one has a special place in my heart. It contains a massive amount of information, but still presents a relatively simple narrative of the wonder of space exploration.

This poster lays out information about all of NASA’s space missions from 1959 to 2015. On the top half, the flight paths are shown in thin lines, recording which celestial bodies the spaceship orbited. The bottom half of the chart contains more information such as the target of that spacecraft, the purpose of that mission (such as a flyby, orbiter, or landing), and what the spaceships looked like.

The main focus of the poster is on the spacecrafts, not the correct spatial orientation of our planets and their moons. As a result, the primary audience for this poster infographic is a space exploration enthusiast, someone who would enjoy knowing ridiculously specific trivia about NASA’s space missions.

Notably, this poster also focuses primarily on NASA space missions, and doesn’t mention any probes sent by European or Asian countries. In addition, flyby missions are still represented with a flight path that orbits the entire planet or moon, exaggerating the flight path a little. This suggests that the Pop Chart Lab that created this poster primarily wanted to celebrate NASA’s achievements in space exploration. In addition, the sheer scale of this poster was probably meant to inspire wonder and awe in NASA’s accomplishments.

Personally, I felt that this poster was effective for me, although the bottom half takes up too much space. However, the general public may be overwhelmed by the data overload.