Observe & Quantify

I have always been an avid hiker, however since Covid began, I have had to reconsider what hiking is, considering that I no longer had access to travel. I began walking all over the city of Boston, and as we move towards a new normal, walking the city has still managed to be my main form of exercise and transportation.

My focus for this project was to explore the concept of mundane activity, something I do every day without much consideration, and recontextualize it. I explored data visualization imagery and wanted to break from the very traditional, poster style data imagery that I saw represented. While I find these clean visualizations appealing and easily digestible, I wanted to insert my own authorship into the equation.

I chose to document my daily steps, as it is something I already monitor daily using my Fitbit. I always begin my research with a word association map, to explore deeper concepts or unexpected associations that pop up through this process. I considered the idea of the literal, represented in a somewhat more metaphorical way, or with a metaphorical context. In exploring the process of walking and step monitoring, I made connections between the use of GPS which is used to count steps and plot routes, but reimagined in its truer sense: a digital map. Maps plot land through longitudinal and latitudinal lines, creating a grid system to help plot data. This lead to preliminary research into these concepts.

I collected references through photographs of of the dirt I see daily, the ground I walk on, the way-finding and directional elements, street lines of maps and the grids created by these things. When I was an undergrad at CSULB, I worked with an artist named Patricia Rengel, who compacted dirt from her childhood and places of importance to her and reshaped them into visually interesting forms inlayed with precious metals and placed on the ground to disrupt the viewers perception of the materials. This served as a reference point for me as I constructed my process.

I began to formulate a series of questions and solutions to further drive my process towards a tangible deliverable. Fitbit already very clearly displays and organizes the data in a recognizable way, so how do I break from this and insert myself into the dialogue, creating authorship over the process? How do I visualize the data in a more visually stimulating way? How can I elevate the mundane nature of walking for me, and recontextualize the process, bring new viewership to the materials? How can I display the final deliverable in a way that contextualizes these things in the way I want to convey it and how can the display affect the viewers’ interaction with the piece?

I settled on two options for display, one being a traditional calendar format and the other a horizontal timeline. I chose the timeline display because this is the best way to visualize the passage of time, and to draw a relationship between time and movement, and the viewer and the piece itself. By making the deliverable horizontal, the viewer must walk along the x axis to view it, mirroring the data process. I chose to make the y axis a traditional bar chart, depicting the city of Boston which was the location of the data collection, where the height of each bar directly relates to the number of steps walked that day. Molding the dirt into cubes with cement recontextualizes the materials, placed on the wall in a formal museum display style to change the viewers relationship to it. Beneath each mold is a placard of specific information, the date, steps walked, and a path that conceptualizes the route walked that day, with destinations denoted by a key.

The first step in my process was to solidify dimensions, materials and method for producing the molds. I settled on a standard rectangular size that wouldn’t overpower the other elements but that would display the materials properly.

This processes was followed by iterations on typeface. I knew immediately that the best display font would be a slab serif typeface. the style of the serifs would suggest the solidity of the materials and emphasize the process, grounding the letterform the way the dirt grounds my steps. I chose Sentinel for the title and National for the body copy. Sentinel possesses the slab serif that I was looking for without feeling overpowering or too strong, while National is a contrasting san serif with somewhat more personality than Helvetica, but with equal legibility. In considering the display of the type, I wanted to explore how the type would influence the viewers experience with the piece, and how it could emphasize and amplify the overall form. I chose to display the type along the x axis with the content to further suggest the theme of walking and the materiality of the ground.

Through a series of wall mockups and revisions, I was able to select the proper point size, alignment and layout of the final deliverable.

The production process organized into four sections: production of the molds, vinyl printing of the text, maps and placard backings, etching, painting and backing of the acrylic placards, and mounting the individual elements. Through some math and general research, I established the molding the cubes with two opposite long tacks in place as points of contact with the wall would allow for sturdy mounting. The printing and application of the vinyl took several tries, as alignment and placement needed variation to solidify the final display. Etching the acrylic proved very easy, however against a white wall I realized legibility would be lost. To remedy this, I painted the back of each placard with a sponge and slate grey acrylic paint, followed by a black vinyl backing which effectively mimicked the visual of the cement and preserved legibility.

The final deliverable showcases and reimagines the mundane activity of step counting in a visually digestible manner. The viewers relationship to the piece encourages movement to see the piece as a whole which mirrors the process, and hopefully encourages the viewer to reconsider the nature of walking and the ground upon which we walk.